Beaver Creek Trip 2/9-2/11

[Lvn2Fish]

Wouldn't care one bit, I've caught smallmouth on the Huzzah in the summertime when there are 500 canoes. BTW to think your not going to have company on any stream in the state on a nice saturday is crazy. If anyone ever asks me for advice on any lake or river i will give them detailed info. I've fished bass tournaments for years now. And I win on occasion, after the tournament when they are questioning you for an article, I give them the full out truth. Karma brah. Me and you guys are in a total diffrent boat. I like to see people catch fish. Hell I have given people tackle right out of my box. just to make sure they catch a couple. It makes me feel good, and it helps them out also. Plus if you have ever managed a small lake you know you have to keep alot of fish to make them grow big.

[Greasy B]

If you ever had the privilege of spending a summer weekend on a beautiful Smallmouth stream and see almost no other people and no other serious fishermen, It a magical thing. My time outdoors is priceless if I have to spend it surrounded by throngs of people such as what's found on the party rivers or reservoirs I'm done.

[Mitch f]

Wouldn't care one bit, I've caught smallmouth on the Huzzah in the summertime when there are 500 canoes. BTW to think your not going to have company on any stream in the state on a nice saturday is crazy. If anyone ever asks me for advice on any lake or river i will give them detailed info. I've fished bass tournaments for years now. And I win on occasion, after the tournament when they are questioning you for an article, I give them the full out truth. Karma brah. Me and you guys are in a total diffrent boat. I like to see people catch fish. Hell I have given people tackle right out of my box. just to make sure they catch a couple. It makes me feel good, and it helps them out also. Plus if you have ever managed a small lake you know you have to keep alot of fish to make them grow big.

Managing a lake is different than a creek. Thinning out a population of smallmouth is probably not the best way to manage a creek

[fishinSWMO]

Take out two words in the OP and I have absolutely no problem with it. Take out Beaver in the title, and Bradleyville in the report. And, I only have a problem with it because it is a small creek that would be easy to exploit. If the same report was given for the Eleven Point, Current, James, Elk, etc I would have no problem with it at all.

The intent of regulations isn't to prevent poaching. That is an enforcement issue.

The problem I have with the regulation is that "Bubba" doesn't have to poach to have a significant negative impact on the fishery. At 6 fish per day per person, all he has to do is bring couple kids and the wife along, and he can keep 18 to 24 fish a day, legally.

So you cut the limit in half, that's 12 total legal fish taken, I still don't think it would make people happy.

The regulations are set for a sustainable harvest of a resource, it shouldn't be changed for a few people just wanting an oasis fishing environment with no other anglers permitted and giant fish every cast.

[Guest]

Deleted

[fishinSWMO]

Of course it would make us happy if they cut harvest in half. Sustainable is the key word here. None of us are looking for an oasis or giant fish on every cast (which will never happen in MO or AR), just a logical limit that will improve fishing. If you don't think regulations for smallmouth should change in the state of MO, you are in the minortiy. Do you want more fish to eat, or better fishing fishinSWMO? Maybe the regs aren't hurting your rivers, but statewide regulations are certainly hurting some streams. There is absolutely no reason that there should be statewide regs for any fish, let alone smallies. I would love to see watershed based regs that manage for potential rather than an maximum sustained harvest. I know that some folks like to keep fish, and I have no problem with that. My problem is that the regulations don't fit the populations and fishing suffers. I travel to fish in many states...and the only state other than Illinois that I can complain about is Missouri.

I believe they already have 10 streams with special regulations for improved smallmouth fishing.

I didn't harvest a bass from a stream last year,

but I dont want to loose the right to legally harvest

some bass if I want too.

Why should the limits and size restrictions be based off what catch and release sport anglers suggest? They are the ones with the heart strings being tugged the most. You could keep suggesting more and more restrictions if things don't play out like you hoped for.

I would rather leave it up to the MDC to make their decisions based on the health of the streams and not influenced by pressure of the online fishing community.

[Terrierman]

^^ That's the whole point of having a Conservation Commission that's as insulated as possible from partisan politics. Manage my fish and game resources based on science, please and thank you.

[Al Agnew]

The creek that Suisaluki and Smalliebigs mentioned is the best example of a stream that should DEFINITELY never have been publicized anywhere. The kid that did it came on here at one point and was talking about it, and I PMed him and warned him that if he wanted his fishing to stay good, he'd better not name the creek. He agreed, but apparently he just couldn't stand it and went to another forum and did so. In that creek the POOLS that held big fish were no more than two to three feet deep at the deepest, and not more than 50-100 feet long. In the summer, you can step across any riffle in two steps without getting wet over the tops of your low-top tennies. Yet the creek routinely held 17-19 inch smallmouth in every pool...until somebody couldn't keep their big mouth shut about it.

The point here is that, no matter how many maps and Google Earth forays you used, one look at the creek and you'd probably think there was no way it could be good fishing. So it was highly unlikely that anybody just using those resources would ever try that creek. It took somebody blabbing about how good it was to convince anyone who didn't already know about it to fish it. And in ONE summer, the fishing went from phenomenal to barely worth fooling with, when it had been phenomenal for a long time.

So in my opinion, nobody should EVER name a creek that is small enough that it is wading water only, as that creek is. There is a reason why some of those types of creeks are good fishing, and the reason is simple. They aren't fished much, and the people who DO fish them are highly protective of them and don't keep a lot of fish. Not only that, but the number of such creeks continues to dwindle, because more and more landowners begin to run people off them due to the actions of the few pinheads who not only slaughter fish but do all kinds of other things to tick off the landowners.

The next size stream to consider is the marginally floatable stream. My absolute favorite stream in Missouri falls into this category. It's big enough that it gets quite a bit of spring-time floating, but by mid-summer it used to be deserted, because it gets extremely low. Anyone who thought about floating it in the summer was usually scared off by the very low water, figuring it would be a real chore to try to get down it. Again, no amount of map reading or Google-Earthing would tell them anything different. Everything you'd read on the internet or elsewhere would say that stream was a spring time or high water float only. Most people are lazy, and wouldn't want to work at trying to float it. But, if somebody started talking about how spectacular the fishing was, that would change a lot of minds. Wouldn't you be willing to work at it, dragging every riffle, if you knew there was the good possibility of catching well over 100 smallmouth a day with several over 18 inches? Several people on here posted about this creek at various times, asking about how easy it was to float and how good the fishing might be, and once in a while somebody new on here who had fished the stream in the summer would post about how good it was. Every time, I PMed them and warned them to keep it quiet, and they did after that. But now, the word has gotten out. The last two years, the fishing has been about half as good as it was in the ten year period before that, and last summer, while floating mid-week, I encountered the first other anglers I'd ever seen on this creek in late summer.

Again, point is that there are reasons why such streams are good, and it's because unless you actually hear about how good they are, you'd never think they were worth going to the great effort to fish. No amount of internet research will tell you that, unless somebody comes onto the internet and spouts off about it.

One more horror story, and I'll even name this stream. It's my home river, Big River. There is a float in the upper reaches of the river, with a somewhat inconspicuous put-in. It's usable but doesn't look all that usable. It's way above where the MDC float book and every other guidebook says the floatable sections are. It gets extremely low in the summer, with flows of less than 10 cubic feet per second. That's the kind of flow that means the only way you don't drag the canoe down every riffle is if you don't care how much damage you do to the bottom of the canoe. Locals know about it, of course, but it's not known as real good fishing, and the low water usually keeps most of them off it.

Quite a few years back, I floated it early one summer, and found that there was a tremendous year class of smallies in it that were now running about 17 inches, give or take a half inch. I caught 15 of them in one day, and lost several more. My brother and I went back a little later in the summer, and between the two of us we caught 17 of that same size. We couldn't wait for the next season, when those fish would be an inch or so bigger. But late in the summer, a couple of guys my brother knew floated that section, and caught a pile of those fish...and they kept a legal limit each, as they always do, being meat fishermen. It was so good they went back again the next weekend, and caught another legal limit each, and then every weekend until late fall, they kept pounding that same section, keeping every big fish they caught. Two guys. They even kept mostly quiet about it...the only reason they told my brother about it was because he'd told them about a certain spot on Wappapello Lake that won them two local tournaments on it, and they swore him to secrecy, not knowing he already knew about it.

The next summer, that stretch was back to being mediocre fishing, with seemingly no fish over 15 inches...at least I never saw any. It's never been anywhere near that good since.

So go ahead and tell about great fishing on a stretch of stream. Heck, if it's already a well-known stream that's big enough to handle some pressure, it probably won't make any difference. But you're a fool if you think you can blab about the little known stream sections on the internet and expect the fishing to stay as good as you found it.

[Mitch f]

Breaks my heart to hear those stories. Legal limits can kill a stream, especially smaller ones.

[Al Agnew]

And by the way...I don't think you have to name the stream you were fishing to give a good, informative fishing report. The techniques that work on one Ozark stream will work on any other stream of fairly similar size under fairly similar water conditions. When I write a fishing report, I tell what I was catching fish on, what the conditions were, what size the stream is, and anything I saw, experienced, or did that I found interesting or surprising. The guy that is living over on the other side of the state and probably won't fish where I was fishing could still find something interesting or useful in the report. I don't post fishing reports to brag, I post them to inform. If it's a mediocre day that was perfectly predictable as to how I would catch fish, I don't usually post. If it was a poor day that I thought should have been good, I post what I did anyway, which might have been wrong...and sometimes what you do wrong teaches you more than what you do right.