Expectations

[Guest]

I think this heat will continue as we settle into the dry season. More low water and low flows on the way.

I'm going out tomorrow afternoon with heat indexes expected near 100

[Seth]

I expect I will talk about doing more fishing this fall but will end up leaving the gigging rail on the entire time and spend my time bowhunting during the day and killing suckers at night. Stabbing suckers and frying them on the bank is something I look forward to every fall. Most giggers are good about not killing game fish but there's always a few knuckleheads that think everything that swims needs gigged. My blood boils when I see a big smally laying dead on the bottom of the river. The good thing about the Gasconade at least is that the majority of gigging takes place close to the accesses and there's a ton of water that they don't get bothered.

[Al Agnew]

Same thing holds true for one or two hook and line poachers, they can wipe out a good hole pretty quickly also. Most fishermen are pretty ethical too, but it only takes a few ...

No, it doesn't. The hook and line guys have to make the big fish bite, and as we all know, big fish aren't known for being easy to get to bite. But all the illegal gigger has to do is see them and be reasonably good with a gig. A big one is just as easy or easier to gig as a little one, while little fish are far easier to catch on hook and line. So only a small percentage of the big ones in a stretch of river can be caught by even the best of anglers, while a good gigger in good conditions can get most of them in a single night.

I still don't like fall fishing until after most of the leaves have fallen, though that's partly because of two things...the smaller streams I fish all summer really do get tough in the fall, whether it's because the fish move out of them or they are just so leaf choked and super clear that it's tough to fish them. And the bigger streams get pounded by the giggers. However, the month of November is definitely big fish time on the larger rivers, and I'll take a rise and some color in the water in October and be happy on the larger rivers as well. I just don't bother fishing streams like the Huzzah or upper Big River.

[joeD]

Obviously, we are pussies. Because we have no balls.

We hem and haw and kvetch to each other on this forum on the deplorable state of smallmouth fishing in Missouri.

Yet we refuse to confront the reality of our situation for fear of offending a certain subset of our fishing brothers.

We would rather be polite, than be seen as an insensitive jerks, regardless of beliefs.

Not me.

Smallmouth fishing sucks on most streams because of the LOCAL asshole hoosier fishermen who catch and keep fish in and out of season without regard to rules or regulations. We do nothing because we are afraid. We are afraid of being perceived as "unsympathetic" or "unenlightened" when it comes to dealing with our "country" citizens, who, we mistakenly think, have a "right" to "their" streams. We make every excuse for them. Poverty. Lack of education. Lack of economic opportunities, Hey, "that's all they know,"

Nonsense. You can talk about farming practices, erosion, floods, droughts, heavy raft usage, whatever. None of those things take fish out of the river. But local assholes do. Every week. Every year. Every stream

I'm quite sure this opinion is offensive to some.

I apologize for nothing.

[ColdWaterFshr]

Preach it brother, preach it. Not offended and I agree wholeheartedly. That and the tournaments on rivers gotta go.

[Seth]

Can't see where tournaments are hurting anything. The guys who fish a lot of them have really good live well systems and the fish are as feisty as can be at the end of the day when it is time to weigh in. Once in a great while somebody has live well trouble and a few fish die but that has only happened one time to my knowledge in a few years of my tournament fishing experience. You won't see any of the guys in our club keeping any nice river bass for the fryer.

I agree 100% that the problem is the hoosiers who kill everything. It's an issue that plagues hunters as well. People just feel the need to take everything they possibly can and rape a resource until the effects are felt by everybody. At least with hunting you can manage private land to try and hold deer/turkey/etc on your property and keep the others from shooting them. With fishing, it's fair game for everybody. Catfishing is even worst because everybody just trot lines for them. I know of people who are too lazy to go get a job but go out and catch hundreds of pounds of big catfish every weekend from the rivers, clean them, and then stuffs it in their freezer or illegally sells it.

[Flysmallie]

Can't see where tournaments are hurting anything.

Not all tournaments are created equally.

[Al Agnew]

The problem with most river tournaments, even the best run ones, is that the fish are relocated, often many miles from where they were caught, when they are released after weigh-in. Of course, this happens in most lake tournaments as well. There have been studies done on the delayed mortality of lake tournament fish, but to my knowledge none have been done for river tourney fish. Nobody really knows how many of them try to move back to their "home water", or how many of them actually make it, or how many of them are so stressed either from trying to get back or from trying to compete with "local" fish around the release point that they eventually die or at least don't thrive. It's possible that everything mostly works out okay and it does little harm, but you could also see where it could be a real problem, especially since we are talking about larger adult fish in so many cases, they being the fish that are kept and weighed in.

I don't worry TOO much about the tournaments. Perhaps their biggest drawback is conflict with other anglers. I don't fish on weekends so I don't run into this problem, but imagine the poor sap who heads down to an access on the Gasconade for a nice Sunday of fishing to find the parking lot completely full because a tournament is being held there that day. Tournaments often concentrate good anglers at given accesses, instead of probably spreading them out over many accesses.

I agree that the local catch and keep anything hoosiers are one of the biggest problems, whether they are doing it with rod and reel, trotline, or gig.

[fishinwrench]

Yeah that is an issue, but how can you deny anyone the progression of becoming a "caring" angler. None of us were born that way and all of us have done our stint being the "local hoosier".

[Guest]

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