Fishing An Ozark River

 

Piney River Goggle-eye

         There is a different kind of fishing in April and May in the Ozarks, something that goes back a couple hundred years… grabbing suckers.  It’s a pretty simple thing.  When the suckers are running upstream to spawn, folks just found a nice clean gravel bar and used a white rag and big treble hooks to ‘grab’ the fish we all called yellow suckers.  

         Actually those fish referred to by most Ozarkians as ‘yaller suckers’ are golden redhorse. In the book, Fishes of Missouri by biologist William Pflieger, there are white suckers, blue suckers hog-molly suckers and river redhorse commonly found in sections of the Ozarks.  None of those suckers get much bigger than 3 or 4 pounds but the river redhorse, 70 years ago reached 15 pounds or better quite often.  

         If you don’t know suckers well you might not realize what species you are grabbing, but they all are great eating if you know how to score the fish body, that consists of cutting thru the meat to the backbone every quarter inch or half inch, therefore eliminating the tiny thread-like bones throughout the body.

         If you look out into the river current when the suckers are schooling before the spawn and you have a treble hook out there, you can’t see it very well.   But you can see a white rag tied about 2 feet in front of the hook. When a fish is over the rag, jerk hard and the hook finds it’s mark and the fight is on.

         But while you are grabbing suckers you might be missing some really good rock-bass fishing.  I have always called them goggle-eye and they too spawn in mid April in rocky swift shoals and the pools at the    end of the current.  When I was young, dad and I used little ‘shimmy-flies’, which were made in Salem, Missouri by a fellow named Art Varner.  We would often catch 12 or 15 goggle-eye from one shoal by just letting the spinner flash and keeping the upright hook from turning over.  

         In time, rubber beetle spins became popular for the little fish and the black perch as well. The beetle spin was just a rubber bait duplicating a shimmy-fly.  And with each lure, every now and then, a good-sized smallmouth would attempt to eat it.  Today in river eddies that once had a hundred goggle-eye, I think it is safe to say there are only half as many now.   Limits have been reduced and in many Ozark rivers and the length limit has been set at nine inches. But enforcement of the regulations on goggle-eye is seldom found on the streams.  The scrappy little fish hold their own but I wish I could find them again like they used to be.   Thankfully you can find them though, and it’s good to know that they are hanging in there.

         First time I ever went fishing as a boy was in April.  Dad took me, and one of our old wooden johnboats, on a trip down the upper reaches of the Big Piney River and tried to teach me how to cast an old Shakespeare reel with braided line and a monofilament leader. 

          I was about six years old and I developed a backlash that I was trying to unravel when a scrappy green sunfish (known to dad as a black perch) picked up the little lure we called a “shimmy-fly” and took off with it.  The little fish was only about eight inches long but to me he was a slab-sided frog-eater and the struggle to reel him in was memorable. I will never forget it.  

         I have caught thousands of black perch since then and that’s because they are such a prolific and adaptable little creature that they survive from the muddiest pond in the Ozarks to the biggest lakes we have here.  Every river in the Ozarks has an abundance of them; they often get as big as goggle-eye (rock bass) and as numerous as long-ear sunfish (punkin-seeds). They will sometimes hit a lure as big as they are.  They can do that because they have such a big mouth for such a little fish. They are a member of the sunfish family, which black bass and bluegill are also members.

         But the black perch are good eating too. As a boy who liked to camp, I always had black perch to eat at night when I camped on a gravel bar near some big eddy on the river even if I hadn’t caught a bass all day. They are especially a favorite food for my number one trotlining target, the flathead catfish.  And they weren’t bad eating for me either.

 

To read other articles about fishing and the outdoors go to larrydablemontoutdoors on your computer.  Contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com

OLD TURKEY HUNTER

 

I have an extensive collection of old magazines and  I thought some readers  might enjoy this ancient story on turkey hunting.  It was entitled “The Gentle Art of Turkey Hunting” and appeared in a1914 magazine called Forest and Stream.

 “The wild turkey is probably the wariest bird in the woods. His hearing is the keenest, and whether from the sense of smell or from some unknown intuition he will take flight and disappear without any apparent cause. For genuine stupidity however, the turkey certainly outrivals the verist greenhorn with a piece of can or an old pipe. Like partridge or quail, wild turkeys will follow a trail or shallow ditch in which some corn and leaves have been strewn and walk straight into a pen, with an opening at the bottom. After scratching the leaves and trash back into the hole, they never look down again to find the opening through which they came. In this manner great numbers of them are caught. 

The Pot Hunter shoots them from a blind, which has been previous baited with corn or peas, but the true sportsman will only shoot them after he has called them to him when they have flown from the roost in the morning. 

Once when the writer was returning from a visit through a short cut in the woods on a beautiful sunshiny morning, a flock of turkeys was seen some distance off on the edge of the swamp. I immediately squatted behind a large pine tree and began to look for something to call them with. Fortunately, I found a small piece of cane, and covering one end carefully with my closed fist I began to call slowly and to my great delight I saw an old hen feeding toward me. I had no gun and was too young then to notice which direction the wind was blowing from and even hoped she might come near enough for me to catch her. I continued to yelp and the hen came nearer and nearer. With my heart in my mouth and almost afraid to breathe, I waited until she got within about ten feet of the tree, when I made a terrific leap, and all but got my arms around her, I had miscalculated the distance however, and she disappeared like a brown streak through the woods. 

This gave me a keen zest for turkey hunting however, and I determined never to be caught again without my gun and unprepared for Mr. Turkey. I had a small muzzle-loading gun, which I used to load with small shot, or chopped up lead or pebbles, or anything I could get, and I determined in future to wrap one buckshot in the moss, which was rammed down on the birdshot, so that I might be prepared for large or small game.

On a brisk cool morning I spied a lonely gobbler on one of my tramps through the woods. At first, I thought that it might be a tame turkey, but he was too far from home for that so I determined to try my luck with the single buckshot as I did not suppose that the small shot would do anything more than to make him run a little faster. I blazed away and to my delight he seemed to be very wobbly. I rushed up to him and grabbed him by the neck thinking that I could strangle him. He was, only wounded very slightly, and promptly proceeded to put up the fight of his life, and gave me the worst licking with his wings and claws, which I ever got. I conquered him in the end however and carried him home in triumph on my shoulders. An amusing incident occurred on one occasion when a bird, which had already been wounded by someone else, was flushed by a pointer dog. He lit on a small tree, and having nothing but birdshot in the gun, I fired at him with that and brought him to the ground. He was still only wounded however, and the dog, having been frequented by the poultry man for chasing the tame turkeys, was afraid to catch him for fear of being whipped. He finally grabbed the turkey by the neck and dragged him to me as if to say “here he is and I have not hurt him.” I need not say that I was glad to have the dog as I could not have caught the wounded turkey without him.”

 

To get the Spring outdoor magazine I put out, The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal or my book about turkey hunting, The Greatest Wild Gobblers, just call my office (417-777-5227) or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com 

A Fish in the Sky

Actual photo I personally took...no enhancement

 

             All through the fall hunting season, those of us who love to hunt waterfowl prayed for rain.  The one thing you need for great duck hunting is plenty of water, and we just didn't have it.  It is unbelievable that in surveying dozens of ponds in the Ozarks I never saw a mallard or even a gadwall. What’s happening is strange!

             All in all, I think I'll put this last duck season in the "ones to forget" file.  Outdoor writers who hunt and fish often have wonderful opportunities and, therefore, some very good trips. We write about those trips and very often keep quiet about the others. But we all have outings we'd like to forget; sometimes we easily forget entire seasons.

            About 40 years ago, I hunted pheasants with the publisher of well-known magazine, and as a prospective writer, I wanted to make a good impression.   I was using a brand new over and under shotgun. His dog, a German wirehair pointer, worked flawlessly that morning. She pointed four rooster pheasants in two hours, and in each instance, I missed pheasants that rose before me so close I could see their eyes blink.  The publisher speculated that I would never write about that trip. 

            I blamed the new gun, of course, and sold it only a few days later. All I remember is, I dug my old Smith and Wesson automatic 12-gauge out of the pickup that afternoon and killed my limit of birds, all of which flushed wild, halfway across the cornfield. But the dog never pointed another bird. In fact, the dog stayed away from me the rest of the day. 

            There have been plenty of disastrous hunting trips for me, but it may be, the all-time most embarrassing situation took place more than twenty years ago when I took my Uncle Norten duck hunting on the Sac River.  I've hunted rivers since I was shorter than my shotgun.  Behind a floating blind, we've floated hundreds and hundreds of miles hunting everything from deer and turkey to ducks and squirrels. Norten passed away fifteen years ago, but he had told me stories about how he began hunting that way in the '30s, and I can't remember for sure when I started. 

            In all those combined years, no Dablemont ever let his boat get away from him until that one December years back.  It happened because we stopped on a gravel bar so my Uncle Norten could walk up to look over a crop field to see if there were any rabbits to be found. I stayed with the boat, adding some more foliage to the blind. I pulled the boat up on the bank and sat down against a log to wait, my back to the river. I dozed off a little in the warm sunshine and my uncle returned and called my attention to the fact that our boat was in mid-stream, heading away with the current. We followed down the bank knowing full well it wouldn't come back, despite my pleading. It drifted into a log on the other side, and sat there, in water ten feet deep or better.

            We had one pickup six miles upstream, and another eight miles downstream. We were in big trouble. Fortunately there was a farmhouse on a distant ridge. Getting there in chest waders was something of an ordeal, but I did it and the farmer said he had an old boat and paddle he'd loan me. The ground was frozen, so he drove the boat fairly close to the river in an aging farm truck. I used his boat to paddle across to retrieve mine, and an hour later, we headed downstream again. The farmer had a lot of questions, of course, and I answered them in a somewhat deceptive manner in order to make him think I wasn't some sort of greenhorn, and then I thanked him and told him my name was Joe Smith. He said there was a fellow who wrote a newspaper column who looked a lot like me, and I said I had been told that before.  My Uncle Norten accepted full blame. He said he should have never left me in charge of the boat.

 

Our spring magazine,  ‘The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal’ is about ready to go to print.   To see the cover go to larrydablemontoutdoors on your computer. To get a copy email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com. Or you can call my office and talk to Gloria Jean about how to get   one mailed   to you.  You can see a very unusual photo on that website of mine this week, a photo of a fish in the sky.

            

 

 

About Fishing…

       I’ve got a couple of things to pass along concerning Ozark lakes that are really interesting.   One is about crappie fishing in Norfork Lake where biologists just recently finished a lead-net sampling of fish.  They checked about 700 crappie to learn the ages associated with different sizes.  From their reports it looks like there will be some exceptional fishing for black crappie this spring on Norfork with a big improvement over their findings from 2022.

      The Fisheries division of the Department submits this report…..

”Crappie in Norfork Lake are reaching harvestable size (10 inches) in just 2- 3 years and growing to 12 inches by age 3-4. The collected fish ranged from 3.4 to 14.6 inches, with an average size of 9.7 inches. Perhaps the most exciting finding was the large number of 1.5-year-old crappie averaging around 8 inches in length. This strong year class indicates excellent fishing opportunities on the horizon as these fish reach prime harvestable size in the coming year or two. The sample was dominated by Black Crappie (89%), likely due to clear-water conditions in Norfork Lake, which favor Black Crappie over White Crappie.”

 

      Then there was news from the Missouri Fisheries division that beginning now, the 15-inch length limit on bass at Tablerock Lake will pertain only to largemouth and smallmouth but not to spotted bass.  Spotted bass and Kentucky bass are the same fish with two different names. And the new length limit on that fish is 12 inches. The average fisherman cannot tell the difference between a 12-inch spotted bass and a 12-inch largemouth just by looking at them.  

      Spotted bass, though the belly spots for which they were named may not be as prominent, can always be distinguished by the rough, rasp-like patch on top of the tongue.  If it is a largemouth the top of the tongue is smooth.  Fisheries biologists know all about the differences but I doubt if many conservation agents can tell one from the other if the fish is in the 12- to 15-inch range.  There’ll be some problems there with a few fishermen getting them mixed up and keeping a 12-inch largemouth.

      Spotted bass are not native to Ozark streams where  smallmouth are found.  Smallmouth males sometimes cross with spotted bass females and create a hybrid between the    two that some anglers refer too as a ‘mean-mouth’.   Fisheries biologist say that they do not like the spotted bass thriving in smallmouth waters as they compete for habitat and food that the largemouth does not seem suited for.  Therefore it can be said that largemouth in smallmouth rivers are not as much of a problem for smallmouth as the spotted bass are.

 

      I have a favorite hard-to-get-to stretch of water on the Sac River where spotted bass grow unusually large. In most waters they grow much slower than largemouth and if you ever land a five-pound spotted bass you’ve done something akin to landing a six-pound smallmouth.  They just don’t get that big without a few more years of growth. Even smallmouth get to four pounds quicker than spotted bass.  A largemouth will get to four pounds in an Ozark river in about five or six years.  A smallmouth needs about eight years to reach four pounds and a spotted bass needs about ten years to accomplish that size.  If a spotted bass reaches 12-inches a largemouth of the same age has probably reached 15.  So there is the reason for this new regulation shortening the spotted bass length limit in Tablerock and it ought to be done the same on every lake and river in the state.

      The Sac River stretch I mentioned has walleye and largemouth too but the spotted bass outnumber largemouth and there are no smallmouth to speak of in that western Missouri river.  I keep spotted bass when I want fish to eat because unlike smallmouth the meat is very white and solid and tasty.  In that stretch on the Sac I once caught three or     four spotted bass above three-pounds in a couple of hours   and then landed one above four pounds.

      One spring afternoon a friend and I motored up a large tributary to the Sac and found a small bluff-hole just full of spotted bass weighing about one to two pounds.  We must have caught 20 there where the water was about 10-feet deep and dinghy colored from a spring rain. On our light gear it was some fishing I will never forget.

      You can despise the spotted bass because they hurt    native smallmouth but you can’t gripe about the way they fight. Get a two- to three-pounder on light gear and you won’t be complaining.

 

Read about all kinds of   fishing on   my book  “Recollections of an Old-Fashioned Angler”. Find it   on www.larrydablemont.com  Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

Walleye Time

        Walleye are a different kind of fish!   They may not always be in deep water, but they are almost always close to the bottom. If you are serious about walleye fishing, you have to give it some effort; walleye don't often come easy in our waters.  And the time for that effort is now.  Successful walleye fishermen in the Ozarks begin to catch them as they prepare to spawn.  The first of the walleye spawn takes place in late February into early March and many of them will have finished by April.

       If there's plenty of water, they move up the tributaries and streams at the slightest warming of the currents that call them.  If there isn't plenty of water in those creeks and rivers, they will move to rocky points and rip-rap near dams and bridges and spawn there.  Northern fishermen spend more time fishing vertically for walleye than they do casting for them.  

       Sometimes they find the schools by trolling for them, and then when they locate a fish or two, they go back and drop a jig tipped with a minnow down to the bottom and lift it up and down only a couple of feet off the bottom.  When a walleye takes a lure fished vertically, he seldom hits it very hard, you just start to lift the jig and feel the weight of the fish.

       Some of the best walleye fishing I have ever had was on the Mississippi river in March, up near the Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois corners, fishing below the locks and dams, drifting in the current.  We were vertically fishing 1/2-inch blue and white jigs tipped with big minnows.  To keep the minnows on, you would run the hook through the mouth, out the gill and then through the back under the dorsal fin.  That day, we must have caught twenty big walleye between the three of us, up to eight pounds, and all over three pounds.

       You can catch walleye that way in the winter on Bull Shoals, Norfork, Stockton and Truman lakes, fishing points and deep channels around standing timber.   But in March, if you fish the same way in creeks and rivers which feed the same reservoirs with lots of persistence you can have some success. Walleye stage in the deeper holes and eddies below shoals in March, and they feed better early and late in the day and even at night.  They spawn at night, moving up to that shallower swift water where the eggs are fertilized and roll in the current.

       One old-time walleye fisherman on the Little Red River in Arkansas, which feeds Greers Ferry Lake, (where walleye over twenty pounds have been taken) told me that he catches huge walleye at night from the Little Red River in the wake of the first couple of big spring storms which come through.  He says those storms, which accompany the first warm spells in early March, quickly raise the water temperature, and walleye come up to stage at the foot of the shoals.  He finds them there and catches them on large chubs and minnows and even bluegill.  His favorite bait is small bluegill.

       Walleye, as the late winter progresses into early spring, will also hit crank-baits, and the long-billed, narrower ones are the best producers, on Stockton, Bull Shoals and Norfork lakes.  Use yellow and red and chartreuse combinations. 

        Every year with the first good fishing weather in late February and early March; meaning whatever temperatures I can stand, I fish tributaries to the lakes for white bass, black bass and walleye.  Sometimes the other species are much easier to find, but it is the walleye which I treasure, because they are so good to eat. I went after a big walleye in the Sac River a few years ago with the same jig and minnow combination I have used so often with good success in Canada.

       I concentrated my efforts on a deep pool below a shoal and sure enough, I got the fish on I had been hoping for.  He was heavy, and fought like a walleye of ten or twelve pounds, staying deep and lunging long and hard.  I handled him like a master and in about ten minutes brought him up to the surface.  And he was a beautiful silver-blue instead of the walleye gold and bronze I had been looking for.   It was a huge drum, about fifteen pounds.

       I am going to try the same technique again in early March, here and there, where walleye ought to be.  I know I'll catch some bass and white bass and maybe another drum or two, but there might someday be a horse of a walleye in one of those places.  I caught an eleven-pound walleye years ago in Manitoba.  I just know I can get a bigger one somewhere if I keep at it.  The time to do it is upon us.

       

An Owl Before Dawn

There is no more efficient predator than a great horned owl.  Silent and deadly, he can eat whatever he wants, up to and including a roosting wild turkey.  Their flight is completely silent, and they occasionally break the neck of roosting turkeys in the darkness before the dawn.  But that does not happen often if there are plenty of possums, rabbits and small ground mammals to feed upon. And, he will attack and eat a skunk with enthusiasm.

Always, beneath a February or March moon, when there is a little snow on the ground, I watch rabbits playing around my place, in the pre-mating-season antics which include games like jumping over each other and kicking their heels up as if they had never heard of a great horned owl.  Certainly the semi-uncivilized atmosphere around my home, and the presence of my Labradors, eliminated the threat of foxes and coyotes, which stay down in the woods behind the pond.  So this became a sort of haven for cottontails, especially with all the brush piles I have built here.  

       Of course, I would probably opt for not having one house mouse or Norway rat in the whole Ozarks, but I like the idea of some ground mammals like the woodrat and harvest mice and white-foot mice…and rabbits! I’d lot rather have cottontails and quail than hardly anything I can think of.  I would have more if the great horned owl that lives beside us were gone, but I would not want to never hear or see him again.

My grandfather, who always lived out in the woods or on the creek somewhere, sawed the top out of medium-sized trees up about twenty feet from the ground, to create a flat landing place for the great horned owl, and then would set a steel trap there, and bait it with a wood rat or small squirrel.  He was paid a small bounty at the county courthouse for the feet of owls, but he also saw no good in them, and believed in maintaining them only in strong enough numbers so that they survived along the river miles from where he kept a few chickens.  Grandpa liked to eat eggs and the owls liked to eat chickens, and he was much more inclined to believe in the survival of things he liked to eat, like rabbits, quail and ducks, than things he didn’t eat. 

There were so fewer men back then, than there are today. Grandpa wasn’t so far removed from a time when a man’s greatest concern wasn’t so much the economic stimulus, but what he was going to eat and perhaps what might be about to eat him. Who could believe we would ever make a great and drastic impact on the land, and perhaps endanger our own existence in time?

When I was 15 years old, Grandpa and I floated a particular Ozark river in a wooden johnboat he built, and caught some nice fish from it.  Today that stream is nearly dry. If I mention it on occasion when I speak to a live audience somewhere, it quickly comes to me they would rather I didn’t. So more often, I talk about the funny stories, which came from the old men in the pool hall back in that time. 

I figured out long ago that even if you know something, it isn’t always wise to try to explain it to anyone. That’s true of things like the spreading of billions of gallons of chemicals, all over the Ozarks.  Nothing will stop it, and what is going to come from it is going to come from it, and that’s that. 

Maybe God himself knows this, and is just watching and waiting, ready to reclaim, rebirth and regrow this old earth sometime in the future.  I guess it follows then, that the best thing to do is the best we can, to try to get our grandkids someplace where there are songbirds still singing and the water still has some crawdads and kingfishers and there are more trees than there are stumps.

If you wonder how any of this has anything to do with that owl, I can’t explain it.  I just thought about some of those things while I was listening to him, mice and rabbits and water, and that fire in California last year, and the mess the cities of this nation are in. 

 It was awfully quiet and peaceful up here on Lightnin’ Ridge that night, with the moon so bright it was casting shadows on my lawn as it sunk toward the west well before dawn. That old owl is likely sitting in a hollow tree somewhere right now, getting some sleep, and maybe a little bit hungry because there aren’t as many rabbits around my place.  Some of that may be his own darn fault. But at least he has no steel traps in flat-topped cedars to contend with now, and his feet aren’t worth a thing.

 Read other columns of mine on larrydablemontoutdoors.com, and see my books and magazines on larrydablemont.com