NEUTRAL BUOYANCY AND THE WAGGLER

The most skillful float to explain neutral buoyancy is the waggler. This quill shaped float is an import from European fishing and readily available in our bait shops. They are made of balsa wood and are shaped like a long straw.

The finesse of the float action is accomplished through the use of split shot attached below the float to achieve neutral buoyancy. Neutral buoyancy is achieved by the weight below the float being enough to counter the floating tendency of the float but not enough to pull it under.

With most floats (bobber or cork) the fish will pull it under the surface and the angler sees that as a chance to set the hook and retrieve the fish. However, this type of approach misses perhaps a third of the fishing opportunities.

When a fish takes a baited hook one of four things is happening. They will spit it out, run with it, stay where they are, or allow the float to rise up.

When the fish spits out the hook, the float may move and is generally regarded by fishermen as a nibble. If the fish runs with the bait, then he will pull the float beneath the surface. This is probably the most common point at which a fish is hooked and is often taught to young people as the time to set the hook.

In some situations the fish will take the bait and hook into his mouth and not move at all. There is very little visible action of the float. If the fish rises up from the location where he originally took in the bait, the float lifts up in the water. With a pencil shaped float, it results in the float laying over on the surface.

The extra buoyant waggler requires more leas split shot which give it more casting distance and stability. They are usually fished in waters at a depth of 1 to 10 feet. Under windy conditions, one would use a waggler with a little larger body. They can be used as either a fixed or slip float. Fishermen tend to use them according to the conditions of the moment.

A small split shot is placed on the line above the float at the distance from the hook that is equal to the depth at which the angler wishes to suspend the bait. The waggler is then applied to the line and a hook is attached to the end of the line. About ten inches above the hook, enough split shot is applied so as to make the float suspend upright in the water. In windy conditions, only the tip of the float is allowed to show as a strike indicator. This would require more weight below the float than more calm water conditions. If only the tip is showing, the float is not affected as much by the wave action making for more accurate responses to a fish attacking the bait.

If the float is properly applied and used, one should experience more bites than normal bobbers. It allows the angler to respond to what is actually going on below the surface.

                                                  Don Gasaway – The Ground Pounder

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Frog-Giggers and Other Greenhorns

July comes, and the habits of a grizzled old veteran outdoorsman changes a little. One of them I know goes out on Norfork Lake in the morning to fish just after the first hint of light. Jim Spencer, one of the finest outdoor writers in the country, and grizzled old outdoorsman if there ever was one, sent me this message just a while ago…. “I caught nine fish this morning - four hybrids, a white bass, two largemouths, a smallmouth, and a bluegill as big as a salad plate!”

Spencer likes to catch hybrids, the cross between white bass and stripers. They can get up to twenty pounds or so, but you don’t catch many above ten pounds. Nevertheless, a six- or seven-pound hybrid fights like nothing you have ever seen of a comparable weight. I wrote about catching a ten-pounder not long ago on the upper tributary to Truman Lake, and it took me twenty minutes to get that fish close to my boat. If you have ever used a medium light action spinning rod with only six-pound line, and caught a hybrid or striper above that weight, you know what it is like to have your drag stripped. A properly set drag is the only way you can land one. You give line and you take it, and you wear down the fish with constant pressure against him.

I am going to go see my old friend Spencer, and see if I can help him down there on Norfork. I have helped him with his hunting and fishing before and he doesn’t even acknowledge it. We have had some times in the past, like that turkey camp in the Arkansas Ouachita mountains twenty years ago when he arrived before daylight on a mountain ridge-top with a big old gobbler sounding off nearby and found a half a brick in his shot-shell box in place of his shells. He has always thought I done it!

But what we have in mind now is setting up my pontoon boat on Norfork some evening, putting out submerged lights to try to draw in threadfin shad, and catch fish beneath us in the darkness most of the night, then fishing with lures at first light from his fishing boat. We’ll have the pontoon boat right there to sleep on, sometime during the night or later in the morning. I can’t wait to try it, and in doing so, escape the mid-day heat.

Spencer lives deep in the woods next to the national forestland south of Calico Rock, Arkansas near a little creek called Sylamore, which flows into the Buffalo River. If Jim writes about something, he has done it, and seen it. You don’t much see that in outdoor writing nowadays. Most outdoor writers live in the suburbs not more than a few minutes from an interstate highway and a Wal-Mart shopping center, a long way from any woods or waters.

Last week I read an article in a large newspaper’s outdoor section about bull-frog season, and I knew just by reading it the writer had never been frogging in her life. She just found someone who said they had done it and wrote their comments. I don’t know if he was a grizzled old outdoor veteran or not but I doubt it, because his wife was concerned about how frogs jump around in a skillet while they are being cooked. Any experienced frogger knows that will happen UNLESS you cut the nerve sheath in the small of the back above the back legs before you fry the frog. With that done, they just quiver a little while they cook.

And another thing, why do writers talk about shooting frogs? No experienced river-man shoots frogs, because he knows you will lose some of them if you shoot them. They can be shot and still jump off into deep water and lost. Besides that, firing a twenty-two bullet at the water is a really stupid thing to do. Those bullets ricochet, and travel great distances after they do.

I am beginning to accept gigging of frogs, but when I was a youngster on the Big Piney, we looked on frog-giggers like a rodeo cowboy would look at a visitor at a dude ranch. You catch frogs by hand, using a headlamp to blind them, and you aren’t really a frogger until you have done that most of a night on an Ozark river. Gigs are for kids, old folks who can’t bend over so well, (and I am getting there) and greenhorns, and suburbanites.

I was thinking the other night about the rivers I have frogged, and they include the Big Piney, Gasconade, Niangua, Pomme de Terre, and a half dozen small creeks in Missouri. But then there are those in Arkansas, many years back, Crooked Creek, the Kings, the War Eagle, Eleven Point and the Buffalo. Those were the days! I will never forget one trip down the Buffalo on a summer night way back when bullfrogs were so abundant you could sometimes catch one in each hand.

I was Chief Naturalist for the Arkansas State Park System, when there was still a Buffalo River State Park, just before the National Park Service took it over. I hired a half dozen young outdoorsmen from Arkansas Tech College, to work as park naturalists that first summer. One of them was a country boy by the name of John Green, and John and I became long-time friends. He had never been frogging, so one night after our evening program in the park had ended, about 9 or 10 p.m., we set out down the Buffalo with two burlap sacks and paddles and headlamps. John had left his pickup about six miles downstream at a take-out point known as the old Rush mining camp, pretty much a ghost town after it’s heyday in the 20’s.

It was a night to remember, as we selected only the biggest frogs and had a limit even before we paddled alongside the Rush access road about two in the morning. And that’s when John began looking for his pick-up keys and couldn’t find them. Finally he realized he had changed out of his park uniform before we left and his keys were back at the park in his uniform pants.

I fired John on the spot, and we paddled back up the river to the park, arriving about daylight. Knowing we had to take a group of people out on a three-hour hike in only a couple of hours, I rehired him. John is still a hand-grabber frogger today I think. I haven’t seen him in awhile, but I don’t think he ever sunk to such a low level that he would gig a frog.

I hesitate to mention this, but if you are a frogger who floats a river at night in July and August, you can catch some gosh-awful big smallmouth bass on a jitterbug. Just turn the lights off, and fish that topwater lure in the slowing eddies beneath a river shoal. Don’t use spinning gear, use casting gear and twelve- or fourteen-pound line. If you aren’t a grizzled old outdoor veteran, it will be difficult to learn how to cast and fish at night in the dark, but you can learn how if you work at it, and you may catch the biggest bass you ever caught in the quiet of a dark night off down the river where greenhorns and suburbanites and frog-giggers seldom venture.

Write to me, if you want to protest my ‘grizzled old outdoorsman’ attitude, at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. The website, where you can contribute your own comments, is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

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Louisiana Coastal Fishing Scene Going Strong at Lake Calcasieu

Hughes Andry lifts a heavy speckled trout as

Mike Bonadonna unhooks another. 

* * *

Guide Brett Stansel lifts a 26-inch Louisiana

speckled trout that took a Corky suspending bait.

LOUISIANA INSHORE FISHING AS HOT AS THE SUMMER SUN

Summer has arrived on the Gulf Coast with the fish attacking soft plastics in western Louisiana's protected inshore waters.

Heavy fish, full stringers, salty air, golden sunrises and clean, green water.

Great Louisiana angling adventure as usual.

No news there, unless all you're reading is the bad news of the offshore oil spill far to the east.

Surely, the oil spill news is bad. The petro-disaster is real, relentless and seemingly endless. The oily sheen that is the spill’s trademark shares those same characteristics.

What the oil spill is not, though, is everywhere.

The western portion of the Louisiana Gulf shoreline, a stretch of more than 70 miles between the Texas border to Lake Calcasieu south of Lake Charles, has escaped with minor impact. Geography, weather and currents get the credit.

Certainly, that's good news on the salt marsh shores around the fishing village of Hackberry, 15 miles inland of the narrow Gulf inlet that marks the entrance to the Lake Charles Ship Channel.

At the legendary Hackberry Rod & Gun Club, discussion of the oil spill is constant table fare and a topic close on the minds and in the hearts of club spokesman Capt. Buddy Oakes and his staff of more than a dozen full-time fishing guides.

“We all have friends and family who are living with the oil every day,” Oakes said as a group gathered at the lodge dining room for lunch. “It’s hard to see this happening to anybody.”

Reality being what it is, life and business go on at Hackberry R&G. Certainly, the club and the region have taken their share of hits. The lodge is new and modern, a replacement for the familiar landmark facility wiped out by Hurricane Rita in 2005.

Also familiar among saltwater anglers on the Gulf Coast is the club’s reputation for putting hungry fish and hustling anglers in the same boat.

I made an afternoon trip out of Hackberry R&G with Capt. Dave Darnsteadt and Mike Bonadonna, vice president of Sportco Marketing, along with Hughes Andry. Bonadonna and Andry represent Shimano fishing products, which we put to the test for seven hours and hundreds of smooth casts.

The high-tech Shimano medium-action spinning tackle I used weighed less than 10 ounces, including the line and lure, The lightweight gear made a great impression on my casting arm, and it managed even the largest redfish with ease.

The speckled trout were in assault mode all afternoon. We finished with 27 trout up to 27 inches long and reeled in and released more than a dozen redfish, all keepers to 24 inches long.

Our fishing was within a 15-minute boat ride of the dock in front of the lodge, which was the final ingredient in a user-friendly and fruitful day on the water.

The next day started with a 4:30 a.m. call to breakfast. My boat, guided by Capt. Brett Stansel, pulled away from the dock at 5:15, first light. In the boat with us was then president of American Rodsmiths, Bob Brown.

We fished for five hours and were in aggressive trout and reds from the start. The action slowed about 9 a.m. but the fish continued to bite right up to the last cast on the local favorite Hackberry Hustler soft plastics and gold spoons. Our mixed bag included a 2-pound southern flounder that hit Brown’s fast-moving Hustler.

We also threw MirrOlure Top Dogs topwater baits and the company’s line of soft plastics, including a Texas classic, the Corky suspending baits. MirrOlure acquired the Corky brand last year.

The visit ended under a hot, clear Louisiana midday sky with a look back at the lodge on the edge of the bay. We had a two-hour drive to Houston ahead of us and a couple of great fishing trips behind us.

The motto of the Hackberry Rod & Gun Club is, “Ya should been here yesterday.”

Well, we were, and it paid off handsomely in new acquaintances, renewed friendships, good fellowship and a few filets for the skillet.

And there’s always tomorrow when, regardless of influences beyond the bayou, the fish will be biting in Lake Calcasieu and the guides at Hackberry Rod & Gun will be in hot pursuit, led by “Pooh Buddy” Oakes. I look forward to the next visit.

* Online see hackberryrodandgun.com, shimano.com and mirrolure.com

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8 Tips For Highly Effective Ground Pounding

Black Crappie Make Excellent Quarry For Ground Pounders

By following a few guidelines, one can have a great day in the outdoors as a ground pounder.

Tip 1 No matter what the gear used, or the bait for that matter, the key to catching fish from shore is to find structure and vegetation in the water. Fish follow pathways along and around structure. They will follow one type of structure to another.

Tip 2 Seldom will fish cross large expanses of open water. It makes them vulnerable to being eaten. If an angler eliminates the large expanse of open water, he cuts down the amount to be explored in search of the quarry.

Tip 3 One good choice is an area where two or more kinds of structure meet. This could be where weeds meet and a fallen tree or rocky area. Areas around rocky points, dam faces, or jetties can also have vegetation near by that will attract fish.

Other good locations can be where feeder streams or canals bring in warmer water, oxygenated water, and wash in insects from flooded areas upstream. Creek channels provide pathways between structures. Old creek channels are often used by fish when they move from weeds to brush or shallow water to deep water.

Tip 4 Deep water drop offs are popular with fish. It allows them the security of deep water and yet the opportunity to move up into the warmer water of the flats to feed.

Tip 5 More good locations along the shore are partially submerged trees or those that have fallen into the water. Stump fields, logs and broken tree branches that have fallen into the water will attract fish. Vegetation such as willows, cattails, weeds, and lily pads provide food, shelter and a place of safety to fish.

Tip 6 Bait can be a major factor in shore fishing. For smaller species, such as bluegill and crappie, live bait is best. The bait can be small minnows, and pieces of night crawler. The amino acids in live bait are an attractant to fish coming out of a long winter of minimal activity. They also will be feeding on zooplankton and insects that are found in or near vegetation.

Tip 7 For the larger predator fish, such as bass, an artificial lures are popular. When working a lure through and area it is important to work it through. Fan cast a dozen or so times. Retrieve the lure at different speeds and work it in different depths.

Tip 8 Be flexible and portable. If a given location is not producing in 15 minutes, it is time to try another one. Go where the fish go.

                                                    Don Gasaway - The Ground Pounder

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Something Good to Eat

Orange day lilies are found all over the Ozarks, and I don’t know much about the plant, which I am assuming was brought over from some other country many years ago. They are the tall orange flowers you see everywhere in June, growing up about 3 or 4 feet high out of ditches and around older homes. Most people aren’t all that happy about having them because once they get started you just can’t get rid of them. You have to dig up the bulbs, and you almost never get all of them. I have a bunch of them up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, and while they are pretty, they spread out and take over.

Now, I am looking at them a bit differently, thanks to my daughter Christy, who is a science and biology teacher and a summer naturalist for the State Park System. She told me that the buds which are about to become flowers are excellent eating. She told me to cut them just before they bloom, boil them for 3 to 5 minutes, drain the water off them, add butter and salt and pepper and eat them like you would eat asparagus. I didn’t do it, I told her mother to do it. But I picked them. The buds are four or five inches long and they are a yellow-green color. When you boil them for a while, the water turns brown, sort of like tea. I want to make sure everyone understands this…we aren’t talking about poke salad or cow pasley. They are delicious folks, better than asparagus. I am mad at my daughter for not telling me this sooner!

But she knew I would write about this, and people would try it and pretty soon there wouldn't be a bloomin’ day lily blooming in the whole country. I can see what might happen, because you could can them, or freeze them, and eat day-lilies all winter. They are exceptionally tasty.

I told folks about the day-lilies on my radio program Friday morning, which is broadcast over 107.7 f.m. from 8:30 to 9:00 from the Stockton Lake area, and many of the readers of this column in west-central Missouri are regular listeners. A lady called in and said that she also takes the flowers from day lilies, puts them in batter and fries them and they too are delicious. So I guess with this news, I have finally reached a point where this column is of some value. In June, there are enough day lilies to feed a bunch of us grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen, and they will go very well with fried fish. Only thing is, they are bound to be good for you, and most of us aren’t use to eating something good for us! But if you think about, they could be rolled in something and fried after they were boiled and that ought to make them even more edible, a little less healthy.

There are lots of good things to eat in the summer up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, even though the spring mushroom crop was a bust. Right now there are black raspberries ripening everywhere, and mulberries will come on soon. I can’t bring myself to eat the young rabbits which are bringing themselves to eat things out of my garden, but there are young squirrels everywhere. They say that shrimp will get expensive this year because of the oil spill in the gulf, but one of my cousins has been catching crawdads out of the river, and they are even better than shrimp. Young squirrels are very good cooked over coals on a grill, and big bluegills out of the pond are also excellent eating if you can’t afford shrimp. Pan-sized bluegill may not be big, but if you scale and clean them and remove the fins and tail and then cook them whole, you can pull the crispy meat off the bone and it only takes ten or twelve to make you happy. Green sunfish from the creek are similarly and equally good to eat.

It is good to live out in the country and feel so darned independent. If the whole world falls apart and there isn’t any electricity or gasoline, what do I care? As long as the masses can’t get out of the suburbs to come down here and steal my day lilies and bluegills and squirrels, I’ll do just fine!

We Ozarkians sprang from a generation of people who drank spring water, chopped firewood to keep us warm in the winter and knew where to build the outhouse so that you could open the windows on a hot night and not worry about the breeze that blew through the windows. No one ever noticed the heat of July and August because our bodies grew accustomed to it. And that’s why old timers on the farm could work in the garden all day long.

Technology came along when I was just a small boy, and my grandpa was ag’in it from the beginning. Grandpa said the time would come we would run out of gas, sure as the world, and no one would know how to hitch a buggy to a horse. He owned an old pick-up that had crank-up windows. I know that when everything else rusted away, those handles still cranked the windows up and down. Today we have electric windows in cars, and I remember a friend of mine owning a Buick made not more than 6 or 7 years back wherein all the electric window cables broke. To get it fixed he would have had to pay 1200 dollars to replace window motors even though only the cables were broke. Technology made it so that you had to replace the whole darn motor when the dinky little wire cable broke, even if the motors still worked fine. What kind of genius came up with that idea?

My old pickup had a switch key that started the motor and opened the doors and it worked great. You could make a new key for a dollar. Today’s new pickups do not have a key. You turn them on with a technological wonder that is plastic, and has a battery in it. If you lose it, it will cost 300 dollars to get a new one. Boy, have we got smarter!!!

We have a mess in the Gulf of Mexico, because of the technology to drill a well a mile beneath the floor of the ocean. We just don’t have the technology to stop the catastrophic leak when it breaks. The President, who is awfully upset about it all, has declared an end to drilling for oil down there in that deep water, so the companies that he is punishing will pick up and move to foreign waters, and we will all pay about twice as much for gas, and soon. I wish grandpa had taught me more about horses and buggies and how to build a really good outhouse. I think a time might come when we need to know more about that kind of technology. Thankfully, I am pretty good at cutting firewood and cooking squirrels.

I hear there are ways to make money out of that gulf oil spill if you can file a legitimate claim. I suspect they are going to have a quite a number of folks trying to get that money who might not deserve it. I am going to give it a try because my magazine may soon lose all it’s Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama shrimp boat subscribers. Somebody please send me the necessary forms, before a bunch of crooks get all that money.

My e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net and the mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

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Reelfoot Lake

The earth shook, smoke belched up from underfoot, sulfur fumes permeated the air and the Mississippi River reversed course. “Mighty Mo” with waves as high as 20 feet flowed inland into a local cypress forest. That was the birth of Reelfoot Lake those violent days of December 1811 and January 1812.

When the settlers returned to the area from their safe havens further inland, they discovered the lake. It was subsequently named Reelfoot after a local Chickasaw chieftain from the area.

Many of the bald cypress trees that fell during those violent days are still beneath the water. Others stand upright as sentinels attracting crappie and other panfish to their “knees.”

Today, this northwest Tennessee lake is a veritable fish factory with some 50 plus species of fish. Most popular are: crappie, largemouth bass, yellow bass, bluegill (bream), and channel catfish. Of a secondary interest to anglers are: carp, gar, bowfin, shad and drum. In the fall and winter months, waterfowl hunters find an infinite variety of ducks and geese. Eagles follow the waterfowl in to stay at the lake for the winter and enjoy the mild temperatures and ample supply of fish on which to feed.

Reelfoot is located in Lake and Obion counties about 17 miles southwest of Union City. It is a shallow, fertile lake with an average depth of 5.2 feet. The deepest point is 18 feet deep. Thousands of fish enjoy the natural cover and dead vegetation which accelerates algae, bacteria, photo and zoo plankton growth that abounds in the lake. The cypress stumps, called knees, dot the lake as do the many fallen trees that lie like sleeping giants beneath the surface.

Beginning in March and continuing into the summer, the crappie, bream, bass and yellow bass action is best.

Ground pounders can fish from shore or from piers located around the lake. Some of these solid, roomy piers snake through the cypress stumps and trees to provide access to the water just outside the trees. It is an exciting place to fish since one never can be sure just what we will be catching.

Large numbers of forage fish come into the areas to feed and are followed by the predator fish. Pin-minnows in the lake are the right size and in large enough numbers to provide crappie with great forage.

The crappie usually move into shallow areas of the lake in early April, and then out gradually as the spawn ends, until they are in the deeper water stump areas. They are caught there until July.

My best luck with crappie came on jigs tipped with a small minnow or plastic tube jig. 1/32nd ounce or 1/80th ounce jigs worked best. Those Berkley Crappie Nibbles can be added as an additional inducement to the fish. I suspended then about 18 inches beneath a small float (bobber). I added a small split shot to help old the float upright. For the angler using plastic tube jigs one has to experiment in order to find the color the fish prefer on a specific day. They can be fussy sometimes.

Don Gasaway – The Ground Pounder

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River Power

Many years ago, working as a naturalist for the National Park Service on the Buffalo River, I would tell people at evening programs about the strength of the river, and how that strength multiplied with every inch of water gained during heavy rains. It had been something I learned at a young age, growing up on the Big Piney, camping on gravel bars since I was a youngster. And I would constantly pass on information which I hoped would perhaps someday save a life, but so many times, you knew you were talking to people who were in a world they knew nothing about, and they could not visualize the danger. The summer Buffalo looked so peaceful and tame.

It is very easy to not recognize any danger at all when the river is normal and the weather settled. A tent set up on a gravel bar with a nice campfire popping and crackling, the whisper of flowing water over a nearby shoal as the river goes lazily floating by. What danger? Gazing at a sky full of stars, listening to a whippoorwill calling nearby… who would worry. But twenty miles upstream in the middle of the night, a strong summer storm dumps three or four inches of water into the headwaters, and several feet of water turns the gentle river into a raging brown torrent in a matter of hours. If you are asleep, and you pulled a canoe up on that gravel bar and didn’t tie it, you may not hear the river take it away. You may not hear the hiss of your campfire coals as the current rises closer to your tent. And when you awaken, everything is fine until you realize that the dry low ground behind you is now a flowing channel that the rising river has claimed. And you are stranded on a shrinking island that once was a nice big gravel bar.

On the Buffalo, I saw it happen several times just like that. There were two or three different occasions when inexperienced floaters camped on a low gravel bar with a dry channel behind them, just as I described. No one ever drowned in such a situation that I remember, because a report would come in, and park rangers would head out in big johnboats with motors on them to rescue the campers. But some of those campers lost all their gear, and some were even found clinging to willow trees as the river rose around them, in an absolute panic.

The scariest situation I remember was a time when I was asked to go along because of the danger. A man and his two children were clinging to willow trees with only their upper bodies out of the water, and the water was so swift we couldn’t get the boat in to them without swamping it on those willows. We ran two big heavy ropes across the stream, got life jackets on them, and a park lifeguard and I carried the two children to safety on those ropes with that current pulling us under as we did. It was one of the scariest situations I have ever been in.

I have written before about the two ladies from Little Rock who tried their first float trip on the Buffalo as a storm hit the river, and one was trapped by her ankle between a submerged canoe which wrapped around a willow tree on a shoal as rising water threatened to drown her. After I wrote about that, one of the ladies involved sent a letter to me recalling in vivid detail that terrorizing day. We freed her foot as the river rose to her chin. I was just a young kid at the time, an old veteran Park Ranger by the name of Chuck Brooks directed that frenzied life-saving operation, by using hacksaws to cut and break apart the aluminum canoe.

All of us who have spent our lives on the Ozark rivers we love so much have always known how dangerous those gentle streams are when their waters swell and become unstoppable torrents of tremendous power. Finally, what I always dreaded might someday happen, came to pass in Arkansas last week, in the Ouachita mountains on two rivers I floated several decades ago. In those narrow valleys, the Caddo and the Little Missouri are such beautiful little rivers, almost too low to float in late summer, but with much more drop per mile than our southern Missouri streams.

The horror of it is too terrible to think of, the loss of twenty lives or more, campers who were taken by surprise in a tremendous flood. In the darkness, with inches of water in a tent awakening frantic campers, they step out into the darkness with a flashlight, and everywhere they shine the beam, there is flowing water. How do you remember where to go to find safety?

I look back and recall dozens and dozens of times I have been caught in heavy storms on the rivers I float, times in the night when there were rises of several feet between dusk and dawn. On the Kings River one spring, the Postlewaite brothers and I packed all our gear and two johnboats up high banks into a farmers field during the dark of night to escape a ten foot rise that no riverman in his right mind would try to navigate. On the Big Piney, I spent many a night in a cave somewhere high above the river, watching a raging storm end any chance I had of floating on at daybreak.

So I will say what I have said as long as I can remember in pages of newspapers and magazines I write for… Ozark rivers are not to be feared, but respected. Don’t take the slightest chance when dealing with flowing water which you do not have the experience to tackle. And when the rains swell the current to a certain point, none of us have the experience or the knowledge to not be in danger. If you are a grown man and want to risk your life in such a manner, it is your decision, but don’t put a youngster in danger. Leave a flooding, or rain-swollen river be, don’t take risks. And if you camp along any stream, camp reasonably high, with high ground behind you, which cannot render your camping- spot an island. When you are on the river or lake with a child, please keep a life-jacket, or some kind of quality flotation device on that child.

There are other things you might do… be someone special and make it so that there is no one who follows along behind you who would ever know you were there. If you leave trash along the river, or in any natural setting you relegate yourself to the lowest of humans, a miserable being who deserves very little in life. Someone who goes along in life flinging cans and plastic bottles along roadsides or river-banks runs the risk of having a life of little value. The earth may well benefit more from his passing than in his short existence.

Last week's pictures from Canada didn’t make it onto my website due to a technical problem, but they will be there this week. Take a look if you have a computer… the website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail lightninridge@windstream.net

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