CFS vs Gauge Height Debate

[Smalliebigs]

59 minutes ago, fishinwrench said:

I didn't "call anyone out", and since you've deleted a chunk of the conversation the evidence for me to defend that accusation is gone.  

Nothing against you, or anyone else, it is just that I can't seem to carry on a conversation with anyone on here anymore without pissing someone off and having to put out those fires all the time.     Obviously it's just my personality and the way I talk, not blaming anyone else.   I'm not going to put on any phoney act in order to be a part of this place. If everyone can't accept me for who/what I am then I don't belong here.  Again, I'm not bitter with anyone here whatsoever, I just don't belong here anymore.  Time for me to step out and quit interfering with the way y'all want this place to be.    No hard feelings, Peace!

bummer dude....don't do that......honestly you are why I come in here every now and then, I need honest and real responses. Don't leave man!!

[Flysmallie]

2 hours ago, Smalliebigs said:

yep that's lame

Douchebag move if you ask me. This has always went on and all it ever took was Phil saying cut it out. Censorship never makes anything better. 

[Quillback]

Sorry you guys are offended.  You call somebody a "Suzy" and some folks will respond in a negative way.  You've in effect called them out.  This is a public forum, all of us need to act in the same way we would in public.  

If you tick somebody off with your comments, you can delete them yourself once you realize that you caused offence, might help to send an apology to them too.  But people won't do that, so someone has to do it for them.  

I realize what Wrench said was said in jest, but it didn't appear that way to the other member.  The whole conversation had to go.

You think that Phil likes that kind of stuff?  He doesn't, he's considered shutting down the board entirely because of stuff like this.  

 

[Flysmallie]

He won’t have to worry because censorship like this will be the end of it anyway. 
 

Oh well. All good things come to end. 

[Al Agnew]

Well, I missed all the drama, so let me address Wrench's question about 75 cfs being floatable no matter what the stream...

Here's the deal, Wrench...streams that are big enough and wide enough to make 75 cfs way too low to float...simply never get as low as 75 cfs.  The closest one I know that would give you that problem is the lower end of the Buffalo in Arkansas, pretty good sized river with some wide riffles, but it does occasionally get that low by late summer/early autumn.  I've floated it at 75 cfs, and there are plenty of wide riffles that you can't float cleanly, and a few that you'll have to get out and walk.  Running Clabber Creek Shoals is a matter of picking which rocks you don't mind hitting as much.  But the Niangua below Bennett Spring, the James below the mouth of Finley Creek, the Meramec below Maramec Spring, Current River anywhere, Black River below Lesterville, North Fork below the springs...they simply never get that low.  So you don't have to worry about whether they are still floatable at 75 cfs.  So in reality, the only time that 75 cfs figure comes into play is on streams that DO get too low to float.  And on any of those streams, the 75 cfs figure generally holds true.  Understand, that's not floating everything cleanly.  You will still scrape bottom on some riffles, and if the riffle is really wide compared to the average riffle you might have to walk it.  You also might have to walk in split channels.  But it's the minimum that's doable without TOO much work.  100 cfs is better and 150-200 is optimal.

So yeah, if you tried floating the middle Gasconade at Jerome at 75 cfs it would be bad...but you'll never see anything anywhere close to that low on that stretch of river.  

And I'll try once again to address some of the other questions in a bit.

[Al Agnew]

19 hours ago, drew03cmc said:

June 9-10 2015 flow ranged from 40 cfs to 25 cfs and height from 4.77 to 4.60. Easy floating. Very good fishing on the Little Niangua. 

Drew, did you float a lot farther downstream than where the gauge is located?  That doesn't makes sense that you found it easy floating at that flow, but if you were a day's float downstream, in the section you floated it might have been about double what it was on the gauge...50-80 cfs.  I'm just guessing since I'm not familiar with the Little Niangua.  That's always a bit of a monkey wrench...not every stream is well covered by gauges.  The Bourbeuse drives me nuts because it has two gauges, one on upper end above the usually floatable sections, and one near the lower end.  Neither tells you much about the middle portion of the river.  And the North Fork is a lot worse yet, since the only gauge is down where it runs into the lake, and tells you absolutely nothing about the river above Rainbow and Double Spring.  Gasconade isn't very great, either...highest gauge is at Hazelgreen, which is below the mouth of the Osage Fork so it doesn't tell you a whole lot about the upper river.  I thought that maybe the one gauge on the Little Niangua is enough, given the short length of the river, to be fairly good at covering the whole floatable section, but I could be wrong.

[Al Agnew]

So let me try once again to explain why cfs is preferable...

Quite simply, it's a universal language.  It's a measure of the volume of water going by a given point at a given time interval.  It doesn't change from stream to stream, it's still the same volume of water flow.  So if you know what 150 cfs looks like on your favorite stream, you can immediately picture that it looks the same on any other stream.  Like I said before, I've never laid eyes on the Little Niangua, but if I decide I want to float it, and look at the gauge and see it's flowing 150 cfs, I can picture that flow in my mind on my home river or any other river that I've floated at that flow, and know it will be similar on the Little Niangua.  But if I see that the level on the Little Niangua is 6.0 feet, I have no idea what that means unless I do a lot of sleuthing.  6.0 feet on Big River at Desloge, my home stretch of my home river, is really high, like really honking, three feet or more or above normal and almost certainly muddy as heck--it's about 900 cfs.  6.0 feet on the Little Niangua looks like it's about 110 cfs.  That would mean to me that it's going to be easily floatable at the upper end--and if there's a lot of difference between the upper end where the gauge is and a lower section, it might be 200 or more cfs down farther and maybe getting just a LITTLE high.

On your home river or another river you're really familiar with and have kept track of what the level in feet signifies, sure, you're comfortable with it and it works perfectly well...for those rivers.  But cfs works just as well once you get comfortable with it.  And unlike the level in feet, you can translate the cfs to other streams that you're NOT familiar with. 

Couple that with the median flow, which is shown on the flow in cfs graph, and it's like one stop shopping.  You know what normal is for that time of year and you immediately see how close ANY river section is to normal.  And actually the little table of daily discharge might be the most useful piece of the whole site, because it tells you the present flow, the median flow (normal) and how low the river CAN get (minimum) and how low it will get during a fairly long dry spell (25th percentile flow) that time of year.  Plus, the 75th percentile figure is usually somewhat close to the highest flow that will still be fishable, though that's a lot less reliable.  So I look at the Niangua above Lake Niangua gauge for right now and look at that table.  Minimum is 182 cfs, which tells me that section of the Niangua will never be too low to float, at least not this time of year.  25th percentile is 224 cfs, and I can picture that in my mind because I know what 200-250 cfs looks like on the Meramec at Steelville, a stream I fish a lot.  Median is 349 cfs, and I can picture that too on the Meramec.  75th percentile is 766 cfs.  Okay.  Right now it's at 1530 cfs.  Looks pretty high.  I can picture THAT on the Meramec, too, and it's kinda at the extreme upper limit of fishable for the Meramec at Steelville--if it was that high in the middle of the summer I'd be pretty sure it was muddy and too high.  The only thing that would make me change my mind is looking at the graph and seeing that the Niangua has been steady at that flow for several days.  So while it's higher than I'd prefer, maybe it's clear enough to fish.

I can't get ANY of that from looking at level in feet.  

[jdmidwest]

Height of water means most to me, I have short legs. 

[Mitch f]

29 minutes ago, jdmidwest said:

Height of water means most to me, I have short legs. 

I think these are waterproof! 

[jdmidwest]

12 minutes ago, Mitch f said:

I think these are waterproof! 

Might be slick on the rocks, especially if cfs is high.....