Three Heavenly Lakes

        There are high school graduation ceremonies going on around the country this month, causing me to remember mine, back in Houston High School in the sixties. I was only 17 when I graduated and never even dreamed of going to college.   My grades were not very good, because I never studied anything except outdoor magazines, and seldom completed any homework. I spent all my out-of-school hours working in my dad and grandfathers pool hall or on the Big Piney River in my johnboat.  

       My dad and mom never went to high school and had no relatives who did.  I was the first Dablemont to achieve that high honor. Our family was poor; both my parents were shoe factory workers.  There was a guidance counselor who knew that, a man by the name of Cloyce Gerdes.  He noted that I had made a very high grade on some graduation test they called an Ohio something or another.  I don’t know how that    happened because I just hurried through it so I could go fishing with a cousin that afternoon.  

       Surely something got switched or confused in those test results, but because of it and the financial situation I was in, Mr. Gerdes called me into his office to tell me about a college called School of the Ozarks, near Branson, Missouri, where poor kids were given jobs on campus to pay for room and board and tuition.  I sort of let that go by me because I had obtained a job sanding cars at a local body shop. Each night my fingers would bleed but it was worth it for the dollar and a quarter per hour I was getting and the opportunity to learn a trade.

       But I signed that application to School of the Ozarks and forgot about it.  The guidance counselor filled out the rest and sent it in.  That was in May and before the first of June I got a letter back saying I had been hadn’t been accepted but I had been put on a waiting list.  I figured as much… what college would want a pool hall kid with a 2.5 grade average? Miracles occur in everyone’s life and that next week one definitely took place for me, a miracle that changed my life entirely.  

       I was helping my dad put a new roof on our house that Saturday morning when Mom came out and told me that I had a phone call. When I answered, a Mr. Timmons told me he was the registrar at School of the Ozarks. He said that I had been fifth on their waiting list and five kids had quit. Looking back, I think that was indeed a miracle and that God was that day smiling on one of the poorest and dumbest kids in the Ozarks. I wasn’t very high on myself and I never thought something like that could happen to me. That night I filled an old dilapidated black suitcase with all the clothes I owned, as excited as I have ever been. In two days I had a job at the school and a dorm room and had started summer classes in a genuine college.  

       For a lot of reasons, the place called S of O was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.  A big fountain filled a pond-sized lake there on campus. It was called Lake Honor and no one knew it was full of bass but me. I found out within a few days of the time I got there.  

       The school sat on a bluff overlooking Lake Taneycomo and a student fisherman named Darrel Hamby showed me a path down over the bluff to find it. He taught me how to catch a fish I had never seen before, the rainbow trout. From Darrel I learned about the efficiency of using a spinning reel and rod and all about cooking fish in a dorm room with a hot plate and a skillet.

       I went to work on campus for the school president, Dr. Graham Clark who showed me some   property the school owned on Tablerock Lake called Clevinger Cove, where a V-bottom boat was chained up beside an old abandoned house.  He gave me a key to the gate and the boat and in June of that year I caught the first crappie I had ever seen, plus the  biggest largemouth bass I had ever  caught. On the weekends that I couldn’t go home to the Big Piney, friends and I would spend the night in that old broken-down house and fish most of the time there.

       Indeed it seemed like I had died and gone to heaven. The story of Clevinger Cove continued for two years, so I will finish it in my next column. But my life as a naturalist-outdoor writer got a big boost because of a miracle… five students quitting and making me a place to learn, away from  the Big Piney River…  Lake Honor, Lake Taneycomo and Tablerock.

 

Read the conclusion to this story, and next weeks column on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.com 

The Second Gobbler

   

                                                         Dr. Fell with his gobbler

       If I write a second book about turkey hunting, one of the stories would be about the spring that I took Dr. David Fell on a hunt in Texas County, in the heart of the Ozarks.  Dr. Fell was a client from Oklahoma, an ophthalmological surgeon well known in the Midwest.  

       He read an article I had written for Field and Stream magazine about hunting wild gobblers and from that he knew I was guiding turkey hunters.  So he set up two days with me in which we would hunt turkeys the first half of the day and then float-fish the Piney River in the afternoon.

       Dawn found us that first morning on a farm I had permission to hunt, and we were only about 200 yards from a gobbler that sounded off on the roost. A few seconds later a second tom gobbled...  I heard them fly down off the roost and move toward us.  About that time I heard another hunter calling to the gobblers.  We were south of the turkeys and he was to the northeast.  He called too much and too loud, so I knew it wasn’t a hen. That was kind of exasperating because the landowner had assured me no one else would be hunting the land.

       Within the next hour the second gobbler completely shut up but the main one, seeming to stay where he was and gobbling quite often.  The other hunter kept at it; not very good at imitating a hen, but sometimes you don’t have to be.   My uncle Norten claimed he once called one up by pulling a rusty farm gate back and forth!

        I am supposing that one gobbler kept expecting a hen to come to him but to our good fortune none came or they departed after mating.  He got quiet for about thirty minutes and then started up again. He sounded off about 30 yards or so closer.  Dr. Fell was well hidden with a tree behind him and some multiflora rose between him and the tom turkey that was beginning to act as if he indeed thought my call was a beautiful young hen that couldn’t wait to meet him.

        About then off to my left I heard the unmistakable sound of a gobbler strutting, with that spitting and drumming sound they make.  I looked over and saw him moving around behind me only a few yards away.  Obviously he was the second gobbler we had heard that morning on the roost, but he hadn’t sounded off since.  

       He was a nice tom but Dr. Fell, who was several yards in front of me, couldn’t see him.  In a matter of five or ten minutes the gobbler moved around behind me and out of sight into the woodlands.   It took another hour but the tom turkey before us moved into sight about 60 yards away.  It was Dr. Fells first turkey hunt and I could see him react.  He began to shake with excitement and I hoped he knew the big bird was still well out of   range.  He did well to wait and when the gobbler was strutting about 35 yards before us I gave a soft call and he straightened high to look. At that moment the shotgun’s roar echoed across the valley and my turkey-hunting client collected his first gobbler.  But the story didn’t end there.

        Dr Fell had already paid me for two days on the river as well as that turkey hunt but he was so excited about his big 22-pound gobbler with an 11-inch beard that he wanted to get it back to Oklahoma to show some of his friends before he cleaned it. He told me to keep the money and he would come back some other time to float the river, and off he went.

Dr. Fell and me with his trophy gobbler

       But while we were taking pictures the other hunter showed up.   He was a timid and apologetic local farm boy about 14 years old, maybe younger.  He looked at that big gobbler with envious eyes and said he hoped to get one like that sometime before the season ended.  Two days later he did, and I was there!  I called up that gobbler too, for the youngster… a few hundred yards from where Dr. Fell bagged his first turkey.  The boy was about as excited as I was when I killed my first one.  I wrote a magazine article in later years about both turkeys.  

       I got paid for one and the other one I just did for another kind of reward, one that didn’t involve pay. It was an act that made me as happy as anything I have done as a turkey guide.  Maybe the greatest part of that season long ago involved that second gobbler and a poor farm kid that didn’t even own a camouflaged shirt.

        You can see a photo of Dr. Fell and his gobbler on my website… larrydablemontoutdoors.com. 

“I Ain’t Never Seen Nothin’ Like It”

 

        What a hail storm the Midwest just had! “ I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it”, I heard one old timer say.  I have said the exact same thing several times the last few years. You have to start getting some age on you to say that effectively.  I never, ever said that when I was 25 or 30 years old.  When I was that age, about everything that happened was a fairly new experience anyway.  But now that I am older I have seen Ozark rivers at their highest ever and in a year or so the same rivers at the lowest they have ever been.  Something about that isn’t quite right.

       I live on a remote timbered country ridge-top not prone to flooding, but subject to high winds and bad winters.  I am scared to death of a tornado with this  ridge in its path. A horrible ice-storm hit pretty hard here, about ten or twelve years ago.  I ain’t never seen nothing like that! Limbs everwhere! But today it seems like it never happened.

       Still, my heart goes out for those in the path of the storms, those who have lost so much because it seems that nature has become our enemy.  It is something many of us may have felt was coming, sooner or later… those of us who feel we live a little closer to nature than those who mass together in a world of concrete and and pavement and glass and computers.  No, I am not one of those global warming nuts…I have no scientific evidence to call upon to help me predict the future course nature might take, and I don’t know for sure what is happening or what is coming.  But I know this, SOMETHING STRANGE is happening, and I am fairly sure that worse is coming.  It is the consequence of huge, ever-increasing numbers of people, and the idea that whatever man does to the earth will have no lasting effect. Chemicals don’t hurt anything, right? It is the problem of man not realizing that the earth is, after all, the boss…and man is not. Will we ever run out of clean air and water, timber, or food. In order to feed twice as many, what will we have to sacrifice.

       I think someday there will be a lot of folks who have been hell-bent for growth and progress and greater technology and more money surprised to see there is a down side to it all in some future day.  People like my grandfathers no longer exist and never will again. In fact if we could see the humans of the future it might make us glad we ain’t amongst ‘em. People aren’t suppose to live like this, turmoil is not happiness or peace! But one thing for sure, there is no turning around; there is no changing the course.  We are going wherever we are going, and good or bad, global warming, global cooling, or global chaos, ….it is coming eventually, and we will be the victims of that AYE_EYE stuff rather than the benefactors.  Men will junk the T.V. and try to remember how to make a garden or wonder where they can catch a fish or how to cook starlings.

I would hate to be living in a huge city, where all of a sudden, there might be no course to take but trying to get out of it, to someplace where there aren’t so many millions of crazy people to compete with and run from.  Some things a man can’t do a thing about.  When a massive black cloud forms on the horizon, you just can’t change the course or the power of the impending storm.  Not even with a computer.

       The impending storm might be huge cities with millions of people living without electricity in July and August.  Think of no refrigeration, no gas pumps, no lights and in little time, no food.  Couldn’t ever happen, right?

       There is one thing that gives me a good feeling.  I know a place or two where the woods are deep and the big trees still exist and there are no people.  There are squirrels there to fry and fish in the river below. And blackberries grow in the summer across the river just like they did when grandpa was a boy.  There’s a cave there to protect someone from rain and wind and ice alike and the spring water in it is still clean.    If times get too hard, I intend to take my window fan and a microwave oven and a good sleeping bag and some matches, and move down there.  In the meantime, I am going fishing this week… a whole lot and close to home.

        If you are still old enough to read on occasion, visit my website, larrydablemont.com or larrydablemontoutdoors.com  Good reading on both.       

Filled With Suckers

 

         I know a tributary to Truman Lake that normally is little more than a creek, but when the area gets enough rain and the lake rises it draws a big bunch of white bass.  So I went up there a week ago and traveled up about as far as I could go, crossing several shallow shoals to get to a favorite spot.  Sure enough, that small hole of water was full of white bass and in a couple of hours a friend and I caught our limit of whites in the neighborhood of 14-inch fish.  But the eddy, no more than six feet deep in the middle was very clear and full of golden redhorse suckers, likely a couple hundred of them, along with two or three dozen bigmouth buffalo that would weigh up to ten pounds or so. 

         Fighting the white bass for a few hours was fun but I would have given a good rebel lure for a big treble hook.  Those suckers that we hillbillies have always referred to as ‘yaller suckers’ would have been lots of fun with trebles and a grabbin’ outfit, which is a little stiffer and stronger rod.  They are easier to clean than white bass is to filet and much better eating.  You have to remove the big scales, gut the fish and then remove the tail and fins.  Then you do what they call scoring, which amounts to cutting across the body every quarter inch all the way to the backbone on both sides.  With the scoring you cut up and eliminate the fine bones in the body.  Then you cut the fish into however many pieces you want and drop them into hot grease, coated with whatever coating or batter you choose to use. 

         White bass are good to eat too, but when you filet them, the red meat needs to be skimmed off the white meat.  If you catch a three-pound white bass it will fight like a smallmouth of similar size.  I once caught a dozen whites between three to four pounds from a Tablerock lake tributary in north Arkansas on topwater lures. One of the best days I have ever had fishing. A couple of those weighed a few ounces OVER four pounds.  In the 1980’s I was guiding on Bull Shoals and had a Nebraska client catch a five-pound five-ounce white bass on a live shad.  At the time it was just a few ounces from a state record.

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The first time I went fishing with my dad I was about 5 or 6 years old.  First time he took me hunting I was 8 or 9.  Since those years in the 1950’s I have become a full-time Outdoor writer/naturalist and that has amounted to a tremendous amount of time in the outdoors hunting and fishing, exploring and photographing and boating and floating, etc. photographing, etc.           Those seventy-some years has helped me to accumulate so much stuff that I don’t know what to do with it all, now that I am starting to face the fact that I am mortal. I can no longer use a ton of what I have accumulated over the years and can’t take it with me.  So in the fall---likely late September or early October I am going to have one heck of a yard and garage and storage shed sale selling and giving away a ton of stuff going back to when I was 15 or 16 years old.   There’s too much stuff to list here but it will include all my fishing gear, boats and kayaks and some fantastic wildlife art.  There will be some boat trailers and duck and goose decoys and even a few guns.  I have about a thousand antique magazines too, going back to the twenties and a few earlier.  I have the first outdoor magazines I ever read and then the ones I wrote for. 

         What I have decided to do is take all summer to list everything and send those lists to prospective buyers and visitors.   We are talking about a couple of hundred items that I will likely shed a tear or two over as I watch them leave.   How many experiences and memories go away with my 50 year old 19-foot Grumman canoe that is likely worth more now than it cost new.   Or my old duck gun, a Smith and Wesson that I bought when I got out of college.  It is getting close to a time I fish with dad and my grandfather again, so I know it is best to let old treasures create some memories for younger outdoorsmen.  If you want to get a list of what we will sell   this fall, send me a letter (P.O.Box 22 Bolivar MO 65613) or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com, and I will be in touch to let you know when that all will take place this fall beneath the oaks on this beautiful hardwood ridgetop we call Lightnin’ Ridge, overlooking the  Pomme de Terre River valley about 40 miles north of Springfield.

 

Photo sequence of wild gobbler mating with a decoy

 

Sequence of photos taken of wild gobbler mating with a turkey decoy

wild gobbler with missing tail feathers

Uh oh competition

The Declining Wild Gobbler

Wild Turkey Nest with 8 eggs

       I came across a wild turkey nest with 8 eggs in it in late April. I doubted it would have many more because the hen was sitting on the nest incubating them before I came along in mid-morning. When a hen is laying her eggs she mates with a mature gobbler early in the day and then lays one egg per day as a rule. She may miss a day or so if she doesn’t mate, and she may lay as many as 15 or 16 eggs if there is more than one mature gobbler. Or she may lay as few as 6 or 7. First year jakes do not usually mate with any hens and first year hens do not usually mate or make a nest. But with wildlife, you can never say never. Often, even mature hens do not bring off a clutch of eggs every year. 

        Years back, Arkansas’ turkey biologist, Mike Widner put radio transmitters on twenty-some hens in the Ouachita mountains, then followed them all through the spring season. He was surprised when he found that only about 15 or 20 percent of the mature hens nested that spring. With all ground nesting birds, the number of eggs laid is not indicative of the survival of poults. It is likely that with wild turkeys about half the eggs laid do not even hatch. If they do hatch during a cold rainy period, the young poults will likely die before they are a week old. I have observed that a hen turkey can delay the hatching of poults during adverse weather by controlling the incubation period of the eggs in some fashion. It seldom happens that eggs hatch in rainy weather. But surprisingly, many hens that have their nests destroyed or eggs eaten by predators will nest a second time. In the course of the spring and summer a hen turkey may lay twenty or thirty eggs just to be able to bring forth a few live surviving young. I would venture to guess that for every young turkey you see in the fall there have been perhaps 20 or 30 eggs laid in the spring. In most states in the Midwest, wild turkeys are at their lowest numbers now in a 10-or 15-year period. Biologists in Missouri, often young people just out of college, do not have enough knowledge of the wild turkey nor experience to really know why. But it is not “habitat loss”. It is hunting pressure and the fact that hunters are twice as many today as they were twenty years ago. Adjustments to the seasons and limits are needed, as fall hunting and early youth seasons continue to knock down gobbler numbers. But conservation departments revel in the increased money those high numbers bring in and don’t want to do anything in cutting back seasons or limits because they believe it will hurt revenue. I doubt we will ever see wild turkeys in the numbers I saw in the 80’s and 90’s, but like the quail, the declining gobblers will survive for another season. It is hard to see what there are today and then know what they could be if only decisions were made by the conservation departments that could make such a big difference. We will not know what this spring and summer hatch and survival will be until we begin seeing the late-winter flocks. In my lifetime, I have killed enough gobblers. I shoot them now with a camera and urge other hunters to do the same. We have got to reduce the number of wild gobblers killed now by hunters who have found ways to do it a lot easier than with a camouflage outfit and a turkey call. In a future article I will talk about a new way of hunting that seldom fails. In the meantime I will put the story and photos of a seven-bearded gobbler on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors… and with it photos of a gobbler mating with a decoy for more than an hour.

Lots of Water To Fish

 

                                          Norten Dablemont with a largemouth bass

Last week, I let the waters I normally fish recede, and fished some farm ponds.  And though they were all full, the bass didn’t seem to mind.  If you want to catch a good-sized bass from a pond or small lake in the    present situations, use big spinner bait, something with a 2- or 3-inch blade, a white or yellow skirt.  I used a 3/8ths-ounce spinner bait, with a big gold willow-leaf blade and a white skirt.  Bass were moving into the shallower end of the ponds, away from the deep water, even though they were not actually shallow.  I just let it sink down out of sight and retrieved it slowly enough to feel that blade vibrating, and the bass were nailing it.

You could catch a few on a shallow running crank-bait as well, but in most ponds, there’s so much algae on the bottom you can’t run a crank-bait very deep.  You can use a suspending rogue, and jerk it and catch bass that way. The muddier the pond however, the more I like a spinner bait.  I have fished ponds in April that were as muddy as they can get, and caught bass one after another on a spinner-bait as big as your fist.         One thing about an Ozark farm pond, some of them hold bass up to eight or nine pounds.  If it has the right combination of bluegills and minnows, a farm pond that isn’t large at all, and sometimes very muddy, can be the home of a monster bass or two.  There’s no better time to catch one than April and May.

Of course, the major Ozark reservoirs, has some April fishing that is spectacular as bass move up around submerged bushes and brush in murky water. Sometimes with these conditions, it is best to don some waders and leave your boat, walking the banks and trying to cast around water that is hard to reach otherwise.   Again, big spinner bait, or a suspending rogue is a good way to find big bass in that high and colored water.

For years I watched my late uncle, a lifelong Ozark fishing guide, walk the banks in early spring and catch huge bass.  Most of the bass he caught in the Ozarks over ten pounds, (and there were a total of six of them), were taken when he was out of the boat, wading and fishing high water.  One of those big fish he remembers still came from Greers Ferry Lake, and he talked about it in his book “Ridge-Runner”.

In the spring back in the 1970’s in he had two clients on a fishing trip to a lake in Texas, and it hadn’t been a good trip because of bad stormy weather they didn’t want to endure.  On the way back, he took them by Greers Ferry Lake in north Arkansas, and they checked into a little lakeside resort just as the front came through after the storm.  

It was getting late, and it was too blustery to take a boat out.  It was cold too, even though the lake itself had been warming nicely, and was high and murky. So with his clients looking for a good meal, my uncle grabbed his casting reel and a red Hauser Hell-diver, one of the first spinner-baits made, and headed for the lake in his waders.  He recalled there was a flooded bramble bush of some kind out in the water off point, and he kept casting into it and around it until he felt a hard jolt, the strike of a big, big bass.  

Uncle Norten didn’t fish for bass with light tackle, and he was accustomed to hauling them out of brush with 20-pound line.  But that evening, there must have been a nick in the line, because it broke, and he was left there wondering how big the fish might have been. 

The next morning dawned cold, somewhere in the 30’s.  His fishermen wanted to wait until it warmed up some, so just after daylight, my uncle returned to that same spot with a white Hauser hell-diver and after a few casts he hooked another big, big bass.  This time the line held, and a minute or so later he hefted a nine pound largemouth with two spinner baits in it’s jaw, one of them the red one from the night before.  Uncle Norten says he never saw that happen ever again.