Rainbow stocking size improving on Taney

[Phil Lilley]

Getting out yesterday (off my sick bed), I visited with some people staying here, as well as doing a weigh in for a group of guys who have a friendly fishing tournament every spring, and I found out MDC as stocked some nicer, longer rainbows lately.  Yeah!

For the past couple of months it's seemed like, all we've been seeing is small Neosho rainbows along with the holdovers from early winter stocking.  Even the upper end of the lake has been infested with 9-10 inch rainbows, usually beating all the other trout to the Zebra Midge.

People were catching good numbers of trout at the Landing and at Monkey Island on jigs or the pink worm under a float or powerbait on the bottom.  But they were also taking a spoon pretty good, especially if there was a chop on the water.

These nicer fish must have been stocked late in the week because I didn't see any of them when I fished Thursday afternoon in the trophy area.

You can tell a rainbow is freshly stocked if it's purplish color and dark, that is if it's from Shepard.  Freshly stocked fish from Neosho are harder to tell because they are silver and clean when they are stocked.

Rainbows stocked in Taney are supposed to be 11.5 inches long on average throughout the year so I guess if you have a ton of 9-10 inch rainbows stocked from Neosho then MDC must have to stock bigger ones to bring the average up... sounds nice but I'm not sure that how it works.

There's still a bunch of fish out in front of our dock.  Steve Dickey said his clients (3 of them) caught 110 rainbows in a 4-hour trip yesterday morning.