LarrySTL

At the WWII Monument in DC today, the goverment first gated it off, and then a bunch of WW II vets including some Honor Flight folks decided to go past the gates, a few members of Congress started to help the vets, and pretty soon the guards from whatever Fed Agency is was stood back and made no attempt to interfere. I'll predict the feds would rapidly stand back on the stream accesses too.

Mitch I loved the video once I got past the "commercial".

The other thing that I feel is a plus at this point almost regardless of how the case turns out, is that by now the guy has a trip or two to court under his belt, may have hired a lawyer, and I suspect by now is getting worried about the "what if"s... not about his future fishing privileges, but what about hundreds of dollars in legal fees, hundreds more in potential fines, the the possibility of at least some time in the Crawford County jail. He may have been showing off to his friends when he speared the fish, but I bet he's not grinning about it now. And at least one of his pals is going to get scared enough to make sure not to do this too. See "deterent effect". Also 10 or 15 years ago Crawford Co was, I believe one of the counties that got the float trips to be a little less crazy by announcing loudly that if you got convicted for pot you were going to get a week or so of jail time. That county might not see the humor in folks spearing their fish. Last thing..... 60 seconds on Google finds all the prosecutor stuff. Type in "XYZ County" "Missouri" and "prosecutor" and I bet it pops right up for most if not all of the 114 Mo counties

Just skimming the Armour and Spam posts, I can hear my cardiologist shopping for his next Mercedes.

If we are talking about the spearfishing guy whose pic we saw from Huzzah Valley thats Crawford County. Prosecutors can be hard to get in touch with by phone, and it might be easier to send an email or (gasppp) snailmail and know it would get to him. Prosecutors can also tend to not pay a lot of attention to folks from outside their county ( most of us can't vote for or against the Crawford Co prosecutor) but if you can politely tie your communication to you go to Crawford Co, you spend money in Crawford Co, and you would like to know that this prosecutor supports harsh penalties for this type of offense, that may carry some weight even from us non-residents. See keyword Polite. Mr William Camm Seay Crawford County Prosecuting Attorney 302 W Main St Steeleville MO 65565 OR same guy at ccpa@misn.com

Dunno bout rivers, but on lakes they will generally devour a medium size, medium depth shad color crankbait, but it can be tough to get them hooked well enough to land.

Cheapest seat on this deal is $ 55 and I suspect the Rams keep a lot more of the money than MDC gets. If I still care about this years Rams team by then, I would probably watch the game on TV, send MDC a donation, and save money in the process. Color me jaded.

Nice fish, way to go !

A lot of getting public attitudes, laws, regulations etc changed is about building coalitions, at least informal ones, of various factions, in agreement on a common goal. When the coalition is big enough, when it is visible enough to the public, lawmakers, regulatory bodies, when there is enough momentum for the goal, the seesaw gets to the tipping point and things change. See historically women's sufferage, anti-smoking policies, and a lot of other examples. If everybody has to be identical to be on the coalition, it's going to be real small. If "our" coalition members have to all be in favor of rod and reel fishing, composed of non-hunters ( not necessarily anti-hunters), feel fine about fishing for bedding bass in reservoirs, dislike snagging for paddlefish in Table Rock, and the Osage lakes, just dont like to eat fish tho not at all philosophically opposed to it, disinterested in trout fishing, and a few more qualifications, I am going to be the only person on the "coalition", and its way too small to get anything accomplished, because each of the criteria exclude some of people. IMO if we can find a way to unite on this one issue ( not on everything, not forever, etc) with the legal giggers to aim at public attitudes, MDC regulations, and enforcement (remember that one costs money that has to come out of someplace, maybe our pockets) we might generate some momentum for putting a major dent in illegal gigging. The more extensive the criteria for banding together are, the less oomph we can end up with.

They may be hard to gig, but you start the outboard and some of em are going to literally jump into the boat. Or get a pitchfork and stab em when they jump. The team that won the KY Lake asian carp tournament had approximately 10,000 lbs or some insane number like that, of them in two days. Catching them, in commercially useable quantities is pretty do-able if there is a enough of a market for them.

Darwin nailed this one !

Somehow this thread seems to have slid into the: "stop SM gigging" *OR* "stop illegal SM rod and reel catch and cook" "OR* "tighten SM regs significantly at least toward '1 over 18' or 'C&R only' ". Why OR ? I know there may be some proud longstanding ozark tradition dating back at least to Quantrell, Jesse James, etc on this, but as one of the sort-of-new kids on the block when did our forefathers declare fourscore and many years ago that we could only approach this issue in one way ? But I think most folks here would say each of those could help. Yes, one might help more than the others. Yes, one might be more politically or financially do-able than others, but if we collectively are not going to do anything other than kill pixels until we all agree on each aspect of this, we are going to be waist deep in the dead pixels and still pushing on. ( with apologies to Abe and Pete)

But hey, cyber complaining is an Ozark tradition that has been around since the invention of the Internet !!

MDC Operation Game Thief 800-392-1111 Statewide number.

Maybe they are bite size for the pythons ?

Something interesting ( at least to me) just occurred to me: Is SM fishing pressure a two edged sword ? The more people fish, and the more they fish for SM with better equipment, and better information and speed of light transmittal of that information here and on other websites, and with GPS locations, graphite rods, fluoro lines, etc, the more pressure there is on the fish, Even if its 99 % C&R pressure, many of those fish are getting sore-mouthed, maybe the day before *my* fishing trip, a few of them are dying from it , probably a few of the largest ones are being kept and mounted. And that other 1 % is, quite legally, killing every legal SM they can. But..flip side.... The more people fish for SM, maybe the more public sentiment ends up on MDC for C&R rivers/streams or one fish limits, more public willingness to support an MDC budget that can give better enforcement. I dont think there is any way to get the non-fishing folks, my neighbors, the people in your office, etc to care at all about SM regulations. I am not sure half of them can identify a bass, let alone LM v SM v KY, let alone *care* about any of them. If there are going to be more stringent regulations, and enforcement of them, about SM fishing, doesn't the pressure for it have to come from "us" rather than all the "thems", and the more of us there is, isn't there more pressure on the SM ?

Luckily for me the horseflies preferred to gnaw on Gavin, but two weeks before that, when I went to the Huzzah by myself I returned with two nice big bites on my back from them.

OK, lets try this picture thing. As you will see, I need to practice some with the cell phone camera too. This was the best I could do holding the fish, keeping the canoe from doing anything too wierd, and taking 4 pictures. In the one with my foot, I am not squishing the fish, but I had one hand thumbing his jaw, one holding the phone camera and ended up doing this to keep him from flopping. In the tape measure pics I am thumbing his lower jaw and I figure his mouth open that much and where I had him on the tape made him about an inch longer on the tape than reality. I'm calling it a legit 18.

Thanks Gavin ! I wouldnt say I floated it well...but yes I floated it....once I got in the canoe. I forgot that the underwater end of the concrete ramp where we started was probably slick as could be so I landed on my butt in the water ( twice..argh..) til I managed to slide around and get into the canoe. After that yeah I did better. I've got some pics of the 18". Once I figure out how to make the pics smaller I will get em from my cell phone to the computer and up here. 18...maybe 18.5... LM....big head, kinda skinny. I obviously need to learn how to take a decent pic of a fish with my cell phone. Ned rig with half of a green Zinker on a 1/8 head in about 2 feet of water in some wood on a LM-ish looking bank. Yes that means I was desperate by then. I could get the occasional poke at a WTD, but nothing big enuf to matter and I threw several kinds of them in a variety of sizes. The *$%@# Dolphin walks wierd.. I think they have the hooks hung backwards; I need to play with it. If that doesnt fix it I can always blame Scott. By the time we got to a high bridge a couple miles from the end I told Gavin I was ready to hitchhike with a jetboat. Despite the heat I enjoyed the float !

I do agree with what Wrench says about my PB 2 example, that its never going to get a guy a good check and would very rarely get him any check, but if you take a 100 + boat tourny several of them with nothing better to do are going to just start by pounding that point for 40 minutes. Probably a far better example at the Elite level would be that Peter Pro hunts up somebody who would generally be on many lists of the top 5 local/regional tournament guys on Table Rock....and in whatever way gets one of those guys to divulge one or two of the best non-obvious, non-community-hole spots he's got that have placed him real well in one or two tournaments in the month before offlimits....and he gets the GPS coordinates and a "how to" primer on fishing those two spots. Thats legal as long as its done before the lake goes offlimits, it happens, not always but sometimes, and some Elite guys will say it sucks and some feel like they personally need to do it to get a check, or to "keep up" with the guys who are doing that. Yes the best spot and the best instructions can turn worthless with the next hard rain. However, it can stay good too, particularly in summer. I have no idea how he found it, whether he just went out and found it or whether it was given to him by somebody, but one summer back in the 1980's Dion Hibdon won one decent size tournament on Truman and finished well in two others, and did all that fishing about 200 feet of one fencerow. The year BASS fished Alton pool on the Mississippi in ...memory fades but I'll say it was the very early 1990s.... there was a regional tournament there about a week or two ...before...after...duhhh..dont remember...a BASS national tournament and six weeks or so before the BASS, about once every day you fished you'd see one or two national big names riding in a boat driven by a good local or regional tournament guy. Its not illegal if its before "off limits', and it does happen.

What Mitch and BW said in the two posts just before mine does happen. A guy goes to the Tourny Lake before its offlimits and finds, or hires the best local fisherman he can find and has that guy give him a bunch of GPS waypoints. Thats legal under BASS rules although a lot of the Elite guys think it sucks, and some of them, including some of the biggest names refuse to get waypoints, or in some cases wont fish before the offlimits period either because they think it sucks, or because as BW says, sometimes it turns out to send you on a wild goose chase. I've casually known a couple Elite guys and met a few others and I have never heard any of them who feel that its illegal *if* you get the info before the 30 day offlimits. I have heard 4 or 5 of them say they think it sucks and that they wish it was illegal. Its not just the BASS guys trying to go to the limits of the rules. Go to LOZ on almost any Saturday and go to the point on the right hand side of PB2's cove. When this Saturday's tournament starts, 5 or 10 boats will be fishing that point because it is the closest logical stopping place for the release fish from the week before. Shioty ( apparently I have to keep the O in there) IMO but legal

I've watched some of the flatter armadillos along I-44 and south of it, but I haver never seen one of em creep. The Missouri ones just seem to lay theret and smell awful and draw flies. Now the Toledo Bend armadillos aren't flat, and they will kinda hunch up and hiss at you.

Now will somebody please whip up this level of interest in suspending rogues so I can sell these ? <G>

One of em was stupid as dung, and the other one was stupid as dung and was shot.

Its beautiful...way to go !