Beaver Creek Floating/fishing Trip

[Dan052]

A friend and I went down to Kissee mills and camped 2 nights ago, and then floated Beaver from Bradleyville down to the first bridge. About 5 miles.

Ended up having an AWESOME day of fishing. We caught in the ballpark of 50-70 fish between the two of us....most all of which were over 10 inches.

The biggest one (shown) was caught by my friend, close to 17 inches if i had to guess. Most all of the smallmouth we caught were over 10 inches as well.

GREAT DAY of fishing!

BIG spider at our campsite

getting ready to launch

Looks like a copperhead, although im not keen on my snake species.

the 17?? incher

[KCRIVERRAT]

Looks like your buddy is living the "high life" indeed! Nice pics...

[Flysmallie]

Doesn't your buddy work for a local cellular store?

[Dan052]

You may be thinking of the same guy, yes.

[FishyBusiness]

Doesn't your buddy work for a local cellular store?

Well fishing is my first job.... but slinging phones does pay the bills!

[smallmouthjoe]

That's not a copperhead, they have vertical eye slit and and hour glass shaped patterns. I'm not really sure what it is, I'll look in to it. Nice snake and fish.

[Al Agnew]

The snake is a harmless northern watersnake. Copperheads don't look much like that. In fact, if you actually see a copperhead, and don't look at it through pure panic like most folks do, you'll never mistake any other snake for it. But remember this one simple rule of thumb...if the dark blotches are hourglass-shaped with the thinnest part of each hourglass in the middle of the snake's back, it's a copperhead, if not, it ain't. Your chances of actually seeing a copperhead while on the water are practically nil, anyway...they don't hang around water except incidentally. In all my years of being on Ozark streams, I've only seen two copperheads swimming the stream. If it's on, in, or very near the water, it almost certainly ISN'T a copperhead. (MIGHT be a cottonmouth, though! I've seen a number of cottonmouths on the Gasconade, Big Piney, and Jacks Fork in recent years.)

Very nice photos!

[Dan052]

i've seen a fair share of cottonmouths as well, mainly on lakes though.

There was this one time I was in a cove on Pomme de terre, and i noticed a snake swimming across the water, up ahead. I noticed that almost ALL of it's body was on the surface of the water too. Which is a common characteristic of a cottonmouth. It was black and had an almost creamy colored belly.

[smallmouthjoe]

i've seen a fair share of cottonmouths as well, mainly on lakes though.

There was this one time I was in a cove on Pomme de terre, and i noticed a snake swimming across the water, up ahead. I noticed that almost ALL of it's body was on the surface of the water too. Which is a common characteristic of a cottonmouth. It was black and had an almost creamy colored belly.

This summer I was down on The Buffalo with my girl and I was fishing and she was sitting on a gravel bar about fifty feet down river, all of the sudden she yelled over to me, ''hey I found you a snake to play with''. Interested, I walked over there and she was standing in the water trying to sneak up on this snake, standing about three feet behind it. I looked at it and knew right away it was a cottonmouth just by how it was swimming. I screamed at her to get away from it and we both ran up the gravel bar. Could have been really bad considering we were at least an hours drive from the nearest hospital. That's what I get for playing with snakes.

[Dan052]

yeah, in my opinion...they should educate students a little more (and earlier) on THEIR region's poisonous animals. It could easily be implemented into a science course, and possibly save someone's life, or at least keep them out of harm's way.