ozark trout fisher

Or anywhere in the Gasconade drainage. It's crazy how many crawfish you see in the Big Piney, Little Piney, etc. I have only been fishing Ozark streams for just a little over a decade, so not long enough to really comment on a long term increase or decline though...

I've always wondered why the MDC decides to electroshock most of the trout streams in the late summer/early fall...When the water temperatures are about at their highest and dissolved oxygen levels at their lowest. Electroshocking would have to be a pretty stressful process for the fish, so why do they choose to do it at the time of year when trout are most likely to be stressed out anyway? Do you think this causes excessive mortality in the sampling process? I am no fisheries biologist,but don't you think they'd be better off to do their surveys some time of year when the dissolved oxygen levels are usually higher? I understand this isn't a particularly vital issue, I'm just curious what you think.

I don't know anything about the event, but the Current is a really easy river to wade. It's a small, relatively shallow stream in the Blue Ribbon water and there really aren't any places you can't wade to...Well there are a few but not enough to be a problem.

It's open year round. The winter trout program is actually one of the more popular fisheries in the park. There are special catch and release, artificial only regs on some of the trout ponds starting November 1 (the trout themselves are usually first stocked in the first or second week of November.) Maybe that is what you're thinking of? Lakes 21, 22, 23, 24, and 28 are the stocked trout lakes most years, and that's where the majority of the late fall/winter fishing is concentrated.

I've been known to occasionally toss woolly buggers with a spinner attached on my fly rod, especially when I'm fishing a stream where the water is up and a little off color. That can work great on our wild trout streams if the conditions are right. . Some purists wouldn't call that fly fishing but I couldn't care less.

Sounds like a good time. Fun getting them up on the surface isn't it? That kind of reminds me of last weekend on the Current...Never seen so many 8-10 inch browns in my life, all up on the surface eating feeding on some sort of a mayfly hatch (I think blue-winged olives, but I'm not too good with bug IDs). Usually you don't find such large concentrations of small browns on that stretch of river except right after the spring stocking. It was kind of weird, but fun all the same.

Yep. All the rivers I fish are fairly empty by the end of October and mostly stay that way until March. The parks and the first 3 or 4 miles of the Current below Montauk are exceptions. The fishing really gets going about late December or January when we get our first real intense cold front and the weather is so cold that it chases most people off of even those streams. Those conditions pretty much account for all the park fishing I do anymore.

Sorry abut the tornado. Thank goodness it didn't turn out any worse than it did. As for the fishing, yeah, I know it can be real frustrating in the parks. The first few times I was down at the parks I thought the same thing.All those fish, and I can't get them to bite anything. Any trout fisherman who said they didn't think that their first couple times down to the park is probably being less than truthful... I'm glad you had a great trip anyway.

Nice! I bet the browns would go crazy for those down on the Current.

Is that you in the picture?

Hey, doesn't sound like overkill...Maybe instead of the 8 inchers I was catching you'll get an 8 pounder.

Let us know how it goes. The river fished pretty well for us last weekend, lots of small browns eating dries especially in the mornings and evenings. Have a good time.

It's good to hear the river is fishing well...I finally have a trip planned to it this fall, gonna spend three days or so floating it. How I have not managed to make it down to the North Fork yet I don't know, but it'll be good to change that. Knowing myself I will probably get skunked the first time if everything I hear about it being so difficult is true, but hey, there are worse things than getting skunked on a good river. I'll make sure to stop by your guys' fly shop and say hello.

Why would you use those? Smallmouth work better.

I don't know what encounter you are talking about, but I bet you that I've experienced similar things. On our last float on the BP, for lack of a better way to put this, it was an absolute freakshow from 6x to Ross...Not just lots of people and the usual party crowd but some stuff that sort of brought Deliverance to mind. Really it was to the point that I will have to think twice before floating the stretch below six crossings again. I will just say that it is not a "family friendly" stretch of river and leave it at that.

6x is well over half-way through the float...You'll probably want to set up camp before then. At least whenever I do that float I ended up setting up camp the first night anywhere from 2-4 miles above 6x. Plus you'll want to spend more time above 6x than below. Between Slabtown and 6x, the party crowd is really non-existent, there are days where you can have that whole stretch to yourself. Below 6x it is your typical Ozark party river, and both the experience and the fishing gets worse. Just something to think about.

Ness, I understand what the MDC is doing here, and in some ways I agree with you. But the problem with their strategy on this, and it's a big one, is that these trigger happy idiots are going to eradicate mountain lions from our state by the time the MDC acts, if they wait for the perfect scenario to finally do something. It's pretty incredible the rate at which these animals are being killed in Missouri, considering how few there are. So the time to act is now, if possible, before this situation gets even more out of hand.

I don't know the 11 Pt well enough to say what I think the top 5 flies are for it. But if we are talking statewide on trout streams, this would be mine. 1. Hares Ear 2. Pheasant Tail 3. Glo-Bugs/Egg patterns 4 Woolly Buggers 5. Adams or Parachute Adams If I could add a 6th and a 7th, it would be the Ausable Wulff and the Copper John.

I know plenty of people around here who would just love to shoot a mountain lion. For no reason, other than it would be cool and it would give them something to talk about for the rest of their life. Wouldn't be surprised if that's the case here, and probably it has been the case in nearly all of the recent mountain lion shootings. The MDC needs to take a stand on this now. This should be thoroughly investigated, and if the circumstances are in fact what we all suspect, then charges should be filed. These sort of "shoot everything that moves" people need to have a healthy fear of prosecution, and heavy fines and/or jail time. Otherwise this will just keep happening over and over. I would encourage folks to email the MDC and tell them (respectfully) what they think about this. It is high time that they do something to protect mountain lions.

I second that.

I am not certain what the best solution for dealing with the felt ban is. All I am completely sure about is that this is not it.

I'd second Slabtown to Ross. That is the special management area (1 smallmouth, 15" limit) and it is a really good stretch of smallmouth habitat. But 15 miles is a rather long two day float on the Big Piney at this water level if you are fishing hard at all, the Big Piney has a lot of very long, slow pools. Better start early in the day if you don't want to be forced to do a whole bunch of paddling through good water on day 2. As for what to use, well I've never done poorly tossing Rebel Craws on the Big Piney...

Okay, so if you are not advocating just sitting back and doing nothing, what course of action are you saying we should take to prevent the spread of didymo? If you have some idea better than banning felt, then we would all be very interested in hearing it.

I don't particularly like that line of reasoning, as in, I don't think we can prevent it anyway, so we shouldn't even try. No, when it comes to things like this, you do everything you can to prevent the spread of didymo to our streams. And then if it happens anyway, well, then at least we tried.

Well, I had planned to do a three day trip to leave Friday and get back Monday, fishing the Current River as well as some of the wild trout streams. Due to factors beyond my control, I couldn't get out of the house until noon Saturday and I had to be back by this afternoon...You know how it goes sometimes. So it was decided to just fish the Current, because I didn't have time for much else.I wish I had some pictures of big trout, but unfortunately this just wasn't the trip for that. I got down to the regular place on the lower part of the Blue Ribbon stretch about 3 PM, set up camp, and went to see how the river was doing. The temperature was 93 degrees, and it was sunny. I need not tell you that those are about as bad of conditions for trout fishing as you could ask for. I fished through the afternoon, but all I saw were trout sulking on the bottom of the holes, apparently not liking this heat anymore than I did. I was not seeing the tell-tale silver flash of fish nymphing in the riffles, a sight that almost always greets you on this river. I tried everything but I knew I was just beating the water...The river was dead, and nothing I could do was going change that. I wasn't even dissapointed. When I saw the forecast I knew exactly what I was in for. This went until about 7 PM, when some caddis began to come off. Then the trout began to come alive a little, although the feeding was sporadic at best. Still it was a beautiful evening to be on the river, with heavy mist giving the stream an otherworldly feel. I tossed dries until after dark, and one small brown was brought to hand. I woke up at a little after 7 this morning, and the weather was blessedly changed. The temperature had dropped some 30 degrees, from the 90s down into the mid-60s, and the sky was cloudy. Wet wading even felt a little chilly.I was just struck by the beauty of the river, the bluffs, the heavily wooded mountain sides, the clean, cold water. This more than anything else is why I love this river, why I can never seem to get it out of my head. In any case, the river was an entirely different place this morning than it was last night, anything but dead. There didn't seem to be many bugs coming off, a trico here and an olive there, but the trout seemed to be up on the surface and intercepting just about every single one. I tried several things first, but eventually I settled on a dry-dropper rig with a #14 Ausable Wulff and a #16 Hare's Ear. I should have just clipped off the dropper, as the fish all wanted the dry (it's so rare and so pleasant to catch more on the dry than the dropper here that I wondered briefly if I was dreaming). This was simple fly fishing at its finest, just fishing the riffles, watching the big, white-winged dry fly until an eight inch brown came and smacked it off the surface. As you've probably picked up by this point, the fish ran really small today, but catching them on the surface completely made up for that in my mind. There were plenty of 8-10 inch browns around, the biggest one caught running only 14 or so inches. I didn't catch a single rainbow, and I didn't see very many either. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but it does make me think that the rainbow trout boom that occurred in this part of the river due to the spring floods may be starting to die down a little. It's back to the brown trout for sure, and I for one am totally good with that. Besides the Ausable Wulff, I also did fairly well on a Pheasant Tail Nymph (which is what took the 14 inch brown). Egg Patterns are what I usually rely on down there, and you can believe I tried them. The trout had no interest though, indeed they did not even induce a single bite. The feeding fish seemed to be concentrated in the riffles, but then again, I always do best in the riffles on the Current...That may just be my style of fly fishing. The higher up accesses were really crowded (Tan Vat was the worst, not even what I'd call fishable), so I didn't even wet a line up there. The crowds weren't too bad down where I was-I only saw one other wading fisherman, although the aluminum hatch was there in plenty. Anyway, it was a good trip, no great numbers of fish, no great size either, but you can't beat getting them on top.