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smallmouthjoe
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Blog Entries posted by smallmouthjoe
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Yesterday was the winter solstice the shortest day of the year and after the day passed we started our slow tilt back towards the sun and now everyday should be longer than the previous and I already can feel the warm sun of spring fast approaching. I do realize that we have the toughest months of winter to endure before the temperature and subsequently my spirits rise. But I always mark the winter solstice every year as a day of celebration for the beginning of a new period. It honestly holds more significance to me than the new year does. So to celebrate this day I did not drink or eat myself into a dazed stupor or make promises to myself that I no I wouldn't be able to keep, I instead went fishing. As bad as it may sound I never enjoy celebrating life in the company of others, I only find the things that make life worth the effort in complete isolation in an environment that has been changed very little by the hands of progress. This makes me an outsider a so called weirdo to everyone I know. For it is very natural for Homo sapiens to be absorbed in the lives of those around them and to come across an individual who is not is very unnatural. But how I feel about it is what matters, and honestly I'm OK with it. I can live through anything anyone feels or says about me as long as I can take refuge in the arms of the natural world.
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After two entire weeks of not fishing I finally had a chance to go this last weekend. No big trip just a trip to the Sac Trail to catch some small LM. I only fished for three hours but it was so relieving and therapeutic. For all of you that don't know about the Sac trail I will enlighten you being that the place has all but been blown out. Plus I'm sure its no secrete. When I first started going there about three years ago it was a great little local place to do some fishing. In the past I've caught fish that were close to 3 out of a stream that is smaller than the upper part of The Finley. The north-side sewage treatment plant dumps its effluent into it so there is algae growth and of course there is the recovery zone down from the plant where you can find no SM. But the largemouth that are there enjoy a somewhat good life living successfully off the pumped up base of the food pyramid. Or at-least they did. Lately it has been hard to find fish down there that are bigger than 12" and the number of fish I've been catching has dramatically decreased. When I first started going down there I saw no one, or I should say no fishermen. But as the years have gone on I keep seeing more and more people fishing down there, not so much actual fishermen but I see something worse, fishermen trash. Fishermen who don't care about the environment in which the fish they love to catch live, really upset me. I don't think that my ability to catch fish has degraded and I can't imagine that anyone would keep and eat a bass out of a stream that is directly down from a treatment plant, even though I don't think it would hurt if done occasionally. So where have all the fish gone? It could be that an increased amount of pressure has forced them to disperse to other areas of the river, but I don't think that is the case being that not all the places down are really all that accessible to people who don't want to bush whack. It could be that the increased pressure has made them unwilling to bite, but I've never come across pressured fish that wouldn't bite all the time, I've fished the river with every technique I could think of at different times of the day at different times of the year. The increased amount of flooding we've had in the Ozarks over the past couple of years could have had an effect on them, maybe but it doesn't seem to have effected fish from other streams.
I could come up with a whole list of hypotheses, but the best one I can think of has to do with large non fish predator that has been enjoying the easy task of taking big fish out of a shallow, somewhat clear stream. Last year during the dead of winter I was down there fishing/practicing with my fly rod when I looked up into a tree that was up river a ways and saw one of the most beautiful creatures that exists on this continent, a mature Bald Eagle. Over the course of the winter I went back a number of times and was able to ID two individuals. I never was able to see one capture anything out of the stream so I can't say with certainty that this is the reason why the fish population has decreased but it could be a possible answer to why it has. If this is the reason I can't expect it to last too long because the Eagles will eventually reduce the number of fish so dramatically that it will be hard for them to feed themselves and they will move on. This last weekend I didn't see the Eagles I saw last year but I did see what was either a juvenile eagle or a female Harrier, I couldn't tell i didn't get that good a look at it. I don't know, I which I had time to really go out there and do more research but I'm busy staying inside reading about biology instead of actually doing it. At least not yet. What a great idea for a field project, "The Effect of Birds of Prey on Game-fish." It would involve my two favorite animals.
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Well, I just received news that my truck is officially dead. The insurance guy pronounced her dead at 3:00 pm October 26, 2009. What a great little truck, it was perfect for me. Good gas mileage, just enough room, manual transmission, and of course it allowed me to haul my kayak or tandem around with me to all the great streams in southern Missouri and north Arkansas. All trucks that I have for the rest of my life will be compared to this one. It's kind of unfair, especially for the next one I get. But I want another Ranger. I think they probably are the best American made small truck there is. The s-10 is a good truck as well, my dad had one and beat the hell out of it and it started everyday and took him to where he wanted to go. But I never really liked the look of them, they look to me a little dumpy and depressed. I haven't really looked into newer trucks, mainly because I don't think I can afford them, but I will shop around and see what I can find. A Colorado is an option or maybe a newer ranger. I"m hopeing that there are a lot of deals out there, it seems to me that there might be a surplus of car and trucks out there that dealers are looking at getting rid of.
I asked the insurance company about replacing my waders and my rod that was broken during the crash but apparently my policy doesn't cover personal items that where destroyed in the crash. Oh well, if that all I lose in this then I'll consider my self lucky. The insurance guy said that he was surprised that i was able to walk away from it with nothing more than a bump on the head and a sore shoulder. And I do feel very lucky. I just wished it had happened after I went fishing. It's now been more than a week without catching a fish and the way things are going I'll be lucky if I can in the next couple of weeks.
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It's funny how even you think you couldn't possibly deal with anymore crap something comes along and throws fifty pounds of it on your shoulders. I totaled my beloved truck yesterday because apparently I'm a wreck-less, irresponsible and selfish child. No one has told me this, it's just my own feelings on the whole mess. This is the story as detailed as I can remeber at this time.
I was going fishing like I do every Sunday. It has become my way to detox from the modern world and allows me to keep my sanity in an insane culture. With all the recent rain I knew there were only a handful of small streams that I would be able to fish, Bull or Beaver Creek were pretty much my only options. I could've gone to Table Rock and fished Aunts Creek from my kayak, but the fishing on Table Rock has been tough as of late and I really wanted to fish a stream, I always prefer stream fishing anyway. Well i decided to go to Beaver Creek because I had just recently discovered some really good accesses and I wanted to explore them a bit more. Plus those fish on Bull have been hassled enough by me in the last couple of months. I woke up later than I usually do on Sunday, around 7:00. But the last couple weeks of school have been hell and I have been sacrificing sleep for my gpa so I needed the two extra hours of sleep. I got up made some eggs gathered my things and was out the door by 8:00. I was in a rush the whole way down there which is why I probably ended up wrecking my truck. Anyway, i was headed down 125, which is one of most treacherous highways in southern Missouri, I was just south of Chadwick rounding a curve when I lost control and slid off an embankment. Flipped my truck over and it landed on the cab with me dangling from my seat belt. I had to crawl out of the passenger side window and climb up the 15" embankment where I was fortunate enough to find someone was driving by and was willing to help. I didn't have phone service out there so I would have been completely screwed if there wasn't someone there to help. Thank you annomuos stranger, with out you the whole thing would have been a lot worse than it really was.
The lesson I learned from this is don't be in a rush to get some place because if you are in a hurry you might not make it there at all. So now I have to deal with insurance companies and banks and car salesmen. I really wish I had just decided to sleep all day, oh well, this can't keep me down.
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