The Storm at Squire Lee’s --PART 1

 

The deep dark waters of the bell rock eddy awaited us as an afternoon storm warned us away.

       Squire Lee was an old country gentleman who lived on a sloping hillside above the river. His home was not far from the little cabin where my dad spent much of his childhood. In the river below his old two-story home was a deep eddy with a giant rock sticking out of it. Dad and I always had permission to drive through Mr. Lee’s land to fish there. Some 20 to 40 pound flathead catfish had been taken from the river around the big rock.

       In May of 1964 I had turned 16 years old and could drive my dad’s old 1950 pickup.  So one Saturday in May of ’64 I, and brothers Tom and Roy Wayne Morton, cooked up a trotlining trip.   We had a canvas tarpaulin that would cover the rack on the pickup and I found an old mattress in Grandpa McNew’s barn.  We could sleep periodically in the bed of the truck while running trotlines during the night.  So we put the mattress in first, then the johnboat, and then loaded gear and groceries and headed for the river to yank out some of those flathead catfish.

       The Morton brothers and I seldom got too skip church on Sunday unless it was for fishing. Proclaiming sickness didn’t always work. So we were awfully happy that Saturday morning bouncing toward the river in that old pickup with the sun shining brightly and birds singing from the roadsides.  Most 16-year-old boys back then were looking forward to taking a girl to the movies on Saturday night but not me. I was addicted to the river!  Not only that, I wasn’t blessed with the finances for such a Saturday night, nor was I blessed with the looks to convince a girl too go with me to the movies even if I found a free one!

We drove down past squire Lees big old two-story home to the river bottom where we unloaded the boat beneath a big old sycamore and set up camp.  

       We had ourselves a baloney sandwich with an RC Cola and some chocolate cupcakes and then loaded the trotline gear to head downriver.

 

 

       

The first rumble of thunder came while we were seining minnows about 500 yards downstream from the pickup two hours later. Just after that, the darkening skies told me to retreat to the big cave above the river nearby. Flashes of lightning to the southwest began to worry me. We pulled the old johnboat way up on the bank and tied it, and I headed up the slope behind Tom and Roy Wayne. Halfway there I encountered an old barbwire fence and straddled it in my wet swimsuit and wet shoes. Just then a bolt of lightning streaked down upstream from where we were and I felt numb all over as I tried to get myself up off the ground.  I realized that I had been the victim of a lightning strike and I realized that while I was hurting everywhere… I wasn’t dead!

       I had remembered Ol’ Bill and Ol’ Jess at the pool hall talking about how a lightning bolt didn’t always kill a feller and that in the aftermath of such a calamity, folks who lived was sometimes reduced to being not as smart as they were or much smarter than they had been.

       I am not sure that a kid who would reach out and grab a fence in a lightnin’ storm could get much dumber.  The proof that I was smarter could be seen in the rapidness with which I gained the awaiting cave shelter, where I quickly started going over algebraic equations I never thought I would remember.  And another thing I remember is that my long hair from that time had lifted my cap up an inch or two above my forehead.

       So there we were a good quarter mile below our camp at Squire Lee’s home in a raging storm about midway through what had been a great Saturday afternoon.  Decisions had to be made.  Thankfully we had covered our mattress with the tarp so it should remain dry, as well as our quilts, stored in garbage bags.   BUT… if the river rose ten feet it would reach the back of the pickup and all our breakfast eggs and baloney and Little Debbie cupcakes would be washed down the river.  I was more worried about that truck of dads.  If it got washed down the river, I would just as well go with it. 

       On the bravery side I could leave Tom and Roy Wayne and get in the boat and paddle upriver against the rising current in that storm, dodging broken limbs and lightning bolts and move the pickup, if it wasn’t stuck in the mud.  On the not-so-brave-but-smarter side I could stay in the safety of the dry secure cave.  Would my as yet unseen bravery come through or would I use the increased intelligence that lightning bolt had given me and stay put.

In next weeks column you can read the exciting conclusion to this true account of the storm on the river.

The Toughest Fish

 

I figure the toughest little fish in the Midwest, and the Ozarks, is the green sunfish.  You might know him as the black perch.  He can get over a pound in size, and I remember catching them 8 or 10 inches long.  They survive everywhere… in the muddiest, smallest farm ponds, creeks and rivers of any size and huge reservoirs. They can live in low oxygen waters and reproduce in almost any kind of marsh, pond or creek.

The scrappy little fish has a mouth unusual for a sunfish, because it is large, like a bass’s mouth.  When they get 6 or 8 inches long, they can tackle a surface lure as big as they are or a huge spinner-bait. When school is out and folks want to take kids fishing, the green sunfish is the fish for that job. They are easy to catch and plentiful. 

I like to go to a local Ozark lake and set a couple of trotlines, then take youngsters and move along the rocky, shallow banks with my trolling motor, letting them learn to cast a spinning outfit with 4-pound line.  In one afternoon, they can learn to cast well. Close to those banks from May through September, you will find scores of those black perch (that name sounds better to a youngster who is learning to fish).  

Use a hook with a small split shot about 1/16^th or 1/8 ounce, and put a small plastic grub or a worm on it, and when it hits the water within two or three feet of that bank, a sunfish of some kind is likely to jump on it.  Keep them all-- it makes kids happy.  They hate to catch a fish and throw it back.  Put them in a live well or fish basket and use them to bait your trotlines or jug lines with, and you might wind up with a big flathead catfish.  Flathead seldom hit dead bait or cut bait…and they absolutely love green sunfish. So do channel cat and blues.  A bait shop not far from me makes a lot of money selling black perch for trotline or limb-line bait. I think they are about five dollars per dozen.

If you take a youngster out catching your own bait some of the fish you catch will be bigger hand-sized green sunfish, and they will really give a youngster with a limber little spinning rod a hard tussle.  I can offer one more word of advice.  You can catch more fish without ever doing any baiting, by using a 1-inch strip of white fly-strip pork-rind, and it lasts for a long time without replacing it.  Green sunfish love it, and every now and then a nice bass will show up from nowhere, to make a kid’s eyes twice their normal size.  Have a net handy.

You might want to keep the larger green sunfish, scale them and gut them, removing the head.  Then boil the fish for a couple of minutes and take them out and separate meat from bones.   Fry the meat left and you can you won’t believe how good they are to eat. 

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I floated a short section of an Ozark River back before the rains came. Once a stream with deep eddies and clear clean water, it is now drying up, and the eddies are filling with silt and gravel.  On the shoals, the rocks were covered with slimy olive green and brown slime that would sometimes wrap around my ankles when I would get out to wade.   Thirty years ago you would never wade those places; they were much deeper and there were a couple of dozen springs flowing along the stream.  Most of those springs are dry now, and it will be a dead river in another 30 years. By that time, I doubt if anyone cares.  It won’t be a world where anyone puts treasure in such things as clean, flowing rivers.

       The day I floated it, there were huge gar ‘shoaling’… the term old timers used for spawning fish coming up into flowing shallow water.  There were dozens and dozens of them, and you could just wade out into some of those shallow shoals where they were congregated and dip them up with a net, many more than more than forty inches long.  On that day, with a bow you could have easily killed a hundred or so gar just by wading.  But though there are some recipes for gar, and a few old fishermen who say they are good to eat, they have a hide with hardened scales like armor, and it is a job to skin one.  They are such a repulsive fish I have a hard time thinking I would eat one if I could get anything else.

If you like to read about fish and fishing, I think you would enjoy my book, “Recollections of an Old-Fashioned Angler.    You can see it on my website www.larrydablemont.com

 

 

 

Goggle-Eye

 

                                              Rock Bass or commonly known as Goggle-eye

       Rock bass are to Ozark flowing streams what crappie are to reservoirs. Creel census figures show that they make up the largest percentage of fish caught and fish kept by stream fishermen in the Ozarks. Missouri fisheries people once kept track of the fish coming out of the Big Piney, Current, Niangua, Huzzah, and Courtois, and they figured goggle-eye made up 25 to 35 percent of the fish caught and kept. It is likely they overlooked the green sunfish caught when they did that survey. Green Sunfish most likely are caught at a very high rate, but not often kept. Biologists from that long-ago time also did a study of growth rates, which showed that rock bass on the Black and Jacks Fork Rivers were three years old when they reach six inches in length. But at Bennett Springs, next to the Niangua River, they were six inches long at two years. Three-year-old goggle-eye there were about eight inches long. Eleven-inch fish (a real rarity even then) from the same waters were seven years old.

       Rock bass will quite commonly reach a weight of one-half to three-fourths of a pound in the Ozarks. And goggle-eye of one-and-a- half pounds can be seen on occasion. A heavier fish in the Ozarks is a true lunker, in the same realm as a five-pound smallmouth or a ten-pound largemouth

       I know of a two-pound rock bass taken from the Big Piney River right at the mouth of Hog Creek back in the early ‘60s. My Uncle was fishing just after dark in a deep hole with a jitterbug, trying to catch a big smallmouth. That huge rock bass, which he landed, was the only one I ever knew to hit a jitterbug at night.       

       That’s one thing that really stands out to me in the years of river fishing I’ve done. If you want to catch rock bass, fish the bottom, use small lures, and fish slow. Despite the things I’ve read about rock bass hitting flies cast by fly-fishermen, I’ve seldom seen them come up after anything on top.

       

       When I was a boy and Dad and I floated the Big Piney and Little Piney Rivers in April, we had the best lure I’ve ever seen for goggle-eye. A man named Art Varner from Salem, Missouri, made a small spinnerbait called a shimmy fly. These lures, one-eight and one-fourth ounce had lead heads and honeybee yellow and black or yellow and brown bodies, with brown or black squirrel hair tied over them. The small offset spinner rode just above the body, and we’d dress this up with a split white pork rind fly strip.

       When shimmy flies became hard to find, beetle spins began to appear, and now there are a variety of plastic lures on the same type of spinners, which are very effective for rock bass.

       The colors don’t make a great deal of difference. 

       Of course, natural-bait fishermen will tell you nothing will beat a night crawler, and that is indeed a favorite of rock bass in the summer. 

       In the spring, they may spawn just below a swift shoal in water as shallow as three feet. In April and May, there’s no problem catching them during the day. In fact, when they are preparing to spawn in the spring, you may catch a dozen or so rock bass in one spot, any time of the day. In June they begin to spread out, seek deeper water, and feed well at night going to the deepest water and coming out at dusk.  If you like to fish with night crawlers after dark in a deep river eddy, you will find that they are a bit nocturnal then.

       The rock bass does indeed love rocks, but some of the best fishing I’ve had with minnows and night crawlers has been around large root wads of fallen trees washed into deep water any time of the year, any time of the day. They love a big submerged root wad just as much as a big rock.

       Something else I’ve noticed about rock bass in the Ozarks, is that they seem to go on feeding binges when a heavy rain muddies the stream and creates a small rise. Sometimes during a rise they move into areas of sand or gravel substrate where they normally wouldn’t be found. Years ago, when there was a slow rise in the river, and murky water coming with it, I would go to some favorite spots and catch lots of rock bass on nightcrawlers, along with bass, green sunfish, and suckers.

       I seldom fish for them today, as upper reaches of Ozarks streams have become shallow, and the rocks I once fished are becoming covered with silt and gravel. Progress…land clearing and erosion! But last spring I made a trip on the lower Big Piney with old-time riverman and fishing guide, Charlie Curran, and we found lots of goggle-eye to be caught on small rubber grubs fished slowly close to the bottom in deeper water. But 80 percent were less than 8 inches. In most streams where rocks are found in deeper water not yet filled ion. Ozark goggle-eye can thrive, IF fishermen will abide by that 8-inch rule. They have gone through hard times, but anglers willing to return all smallmouth, and return any rock bass under 8 inches, can play a big role in keeping rivers something like they were in that time long ago when only wooden johnboats drifted downstream, in the land of brownies, black perch and goggle-eyes!

Fishing is Like A Box of Chocolates

                                     

                        My daughter Lori Jean, who is a doctor at Missouri State University, is very alarmed about increasing numbers of tick diseases amongst her patients. She asks me to use a tick repellent on my boots and pants when I am outdoors.  That is something I have not often done, but the urgency in her voice concerning the Alpha-Gal syndrome spread by the Lone Star ticks makes me inclined to follow her advice. It makes one allergic to red meat and has caused deaths in the Ozarks.

            I have produced a 110-page summer magazine, which carries a two-page article about tick diseases written by Lori.  You need to read that article. I have about 100 of that magazine left to distribute.  To get one postpaid send seven dollars to Lightnin’ Ridge Magazine, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  Or you can get one by calling my office, 417 777 5227.   The magazine has lots of great outdoor stories in it that I think you will enjoy.  But that article by my doctor-daughter will give you information you need to know about tick-borne diseases.

 

            Fishing is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get … and often you’d just as soon it was different than what you ended up with. That’s what happened to me this past week.  On a day that I figgered I would catch the farr out of ‘em--- I didn’t.  But I started out with great anticipation.  Casting nothing more than a twirly-tailed, yellow plastic jig with a lead head, I laid into a hard-fighting fish that arced my rod like he was a slab-sided, black-bellied, frog-eater.  He stayed deep and pulled like a roped goat!  I guess that’s what told me I didn’t have a bass.  A bass would come up and woller around on the surface a little, and maybe even jump clean out of the water.              

          This fish that had grabbed my little eighth-ounce jig just stayed down and pulled with determination…which led me to hope he just might be a walleye.  That was it, I told myself as I let him pull line against the drag of my spinning reel... I had a big walleye, likely 6 or 7 pounds.  In the depths beneath my boat I saw it finally, a white and pink- sided lunker, far different in color than what a gold-sided walleye would be.  I fought that fish for a good five or six minutes.  He was almost two feet long and too big to lift over the side of the boat with six-pound line, so I netted him and let it flop around for a moment as I cast aspersions upon her!  She was a doggone egg-filled drum!!!  But for an angler who   is only interested in fighting a big fish, a six or seven pound drum is not too great a problem.

            I can only add to this story that I was mostly trying to catch some white bass and never saw a one for the next two hours.  But the story is not over.  Two hours later I hooked another big drum, a good four pounds in weight, and had another tussle worth the trip up the river. This time I was more prepared when my walleye turned into a 20- inch drum.  But when you have fished for two hours for nothing but two drum you   aren’t exactly whistling and grinning about your good luck.  

            Then something happened that made the whole trip worth it.  I was just sitting in my boat taking my drum-tempting yellow jig off to put on a little crank bait when suddenly there was a big splash out in the middle of the river. Bass do that. Drum don’t.  So what I did was, I threw that crank bait out about where the rings were spreading out in the water and that bass nailed it.  It was a grand struggle, him taking off with my crank bait and several feet of line and me enjoying the bend of the rod and the whine of the reel. It was a bass all right, and I got to see him come up and jump out of the water trying to throw the hooks. I got my net beneath him, an 18-inch beauty that was half smallmouth and half spotted (Kentucky) bass.  You can see a color picture of the rascal on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.   
             I don’t like that hybridation but it is seen often in some waters where the southern spotted bass has been introduced.  Most fishermen who catch one don’t realize what it is, but there is a smooth tongue on a true smallmouth and on the hybrid you will see spots on the belly, a raspy patch on the tongue and the red eye of the smallmouth.

            Well anyway that was the last fish.  A three-fish day over three or four hours of fishing isn’t something to brag about when you are an outdoor writer, but the afternoon was a boatload of treasure for me because I love being out there on the river by    myself, fish or no fish.  I shared the time with a pair of eagles and a mink and I thanked God for time I got to spend there. I always do.

 

            

 

Memories of a Fishing Guide

 

     Recently I wrote about floating the Roubidoux River as boy, working as a fishing guide for newspaper editor Lane Davis. Lane liked to fish that river because he felt it received less fishing pressure and might have more fish, if not bigger  ones.  I always wondered, what the Roubidoux River was named after.  The French name ‘robidou’ means “son of Robert”.

       It was a great river then, but not so much now.  Deeper eddies there have been filled with gravel and sand… so much of the fish habitat is gone.  And the water flow is much less now than it was in the 60’s, because dozens of small springs that fed the river have dried up. Modern Ozarkians do not realize what a water crisis our country will experience in another fifty years or less.  Our Ozark rivers will become creeks. 

       Back in 1960 there were no aluminum river boats or canoes, but dad had built a couple of 14-foot wooden johnboats that you could use to float small streams. They were heavy but better to fish from than anything made of metal.  The wood bottoms were slick enough to slide over the rocks and gravel and so easy to handle even a kid could paddle one.

       Boy, those were the days… not so much because there were lots bigger bass and goggle-eye and green sunfish, but because there were so many more of them.

       The biggest smallmouth I have ever seen caught from the rivers of the Ozarks was a 23-inch bass I know would have weighed six pounds.  It was the summer of 1959 on the Big Piney, guiding a Houston man and his wife, Joe and Katy Richardson.  I was 12 and it was my first paid trip as a float-fishing guide in one of those old wooden johnboats.  I was paid 50 cents an hour and Joe gave me a five-dollar tip at the end of the day. I told my dad that I had found my life’s profession!

       Back then I had no landing net, so I got out in the water up to my knees and landed Katy’s huge bass by hand. She was a fine lady and fisherman and no one deserved a fish more.  I still have the black ‘Heddon River Runt’ she caught it on and her photo with the fish and the lure are on display in my Big Piney nature center.  I remember it like it was yesterday and I have never seen a smallmouth like it from a river. It was a dark chocolate brown with almost no markings.  I am going to use a picture of the fish to have a replica made for the nature center.

As to the nature center… on May 10 we are going to have a big yard sale there too help pay for some additional work that needs too be done and some displays.  Hope many of you can attend.  We have lots of stuff for sale, some guns and fishing gear, and hundreds of lures, a boat trailer and a kayak or two.

 

And I also wrote about brown trout in a recent column. Here is more about that species of fish…

       Brown trout were introduced to American waters in 1883, from the British Isles and Eastern Europe.  The western U.S. had several species of trout, but there were no brown trout. Missouri stocked a quarter million of them in the Ozarks in the late twenties and early thirties.  Arkansas followed at a later time.

       The brown trout has been stocked and today thrive successfully in Missouri’ Meramec River, the Niangua River Taneycomo Lake, the Current River and the North Fork River. In Arkansas, they are stocked in the White River below Beaver Lake Dam, Bull Shoals Dam, Norfork Lake Dam and in the Little Red River below Greer’s Ferry.  There is evidence that they have actually had a few successful winter spawns in the Arkansas White River.

       Brown trout eat almost anything when they are smaller, from insects and crayfish to minnows, sculpins and shad. The larger they get the more likely they are to eat larger prey…from small rainbow trout to small ducklings to mice.

       Outdoor writer Jim Spencer tells of catching a brown trout near Calico Rock on the lower White that he believes was larger than 30 pounds. He nearly landed the fish but he couldn’t get it in a net he had. There are many browns in the White that are 20 to 30 pounds and most guides there know where to find them when the water is low.  Some have been caught and released.

       I hope readers will check out my websites, larrydablemont.com and larrydablemontoutdoors.   You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.