Trout season opener ‘something special’

This gathering of trout anglers at Roaring River on opening day will be similar on March 1 as trout anglers are getting ready for the annual onslaught of anxious anglers at Missouri’s four trout parks.

Ken White

The countdown has started, in less than a month, the unofficial start of fishing season begins. Of course, the fishing never stops in Missouri, but there is something special about the annual trout fishing season opener in the four trout parks on March 1.

Harold Foster never puts up his fishing gear and has sampled fishing since the first of 2018 by catching crappie and white bass below the dam at Truman Lake, several bass, crappie and walleye on Bull Shoals and even crappie, bass and bluegill from several farm ponds. Not a bad start for the year.

Reports of crappie hitting at Stockton and the Lake of the Ozarks as well as some good fishing on Lake Norfork caused some anglers to head for the lake. Bob Parker, Springfield said, “I caught several nice walleye at Norfork, but had to go deep to get them. They were around 40 feet deep, it was like deep sea fishing.”

Parker and Tom Jackson heard the stripers were hitting at Norfork so they gave it a try and were glad they did. It was a first for both anglers. They caught several stripers to go along with four walleye.

You really need a fish locator when fishing for stripers, they have an affinity for deep water and tend to suspend at mid-depth levels so electronic depth finders are important to stripers fishing success. If you are good at interpreting them, flashers will help you locate the fish. A quality chart recorder, however, draws a picture of the structure and pinpoints individual fish more clearly than a flasher. A “woodpile” hanging at the edge of a drop-off is stripers talk for a school of stripers that looks something like a woodpile on the graph. When you find one, you have found a stripers honey hole. When the graph shows the fish fanning out, that is the time to hang on to your fishing rod.

Parker said, “This was our first fishing trip of the new year, it was a great way to start 2018. We might not have another trip as good for the rest of the year.”

Back to the trout opener, with a Thursday start to the trout catch and keep season, the crowd might not be as large as a weekend start, but you can be sure the banks will be lined with anxious anglers waiting to make their first cast. Opening day isn’t just about fishing, it is also reunion time for many of the anglers. That’s the way it is at the trout parks on opening day. Trout fishing really never stops in Missouri. There is always trout fishing at Lake Taneycomo as well as a few other streams in the state, but March 1 is special no matter what the weather or anything else. It will be no different this year as thousands of trout anglers gather at the trout parks looking to hook “old fighter” as the tradition continues.

Missouri is a fishing state. Around a fourth of our total population, encompassing all ages, fishes. Anglers spend millions of dollars on fishing tackle and millions more on services and big items including boats. This is good for the state’s economy and the need for recreation.

If you should ask these Missourians why they go fishing, more than likely the answer would be to catch fish and have fun. Yet, the average shows that out of 10 fishermen, one will catch most of the fish. Why should this be?

Some call it luck, and at times it is. But day after day and trip after trip, know how is the answer. A case in point was brought to my attention when, while fishing from a dock in January, I noticed one fisherman bring in a limit of crappie while two other fishermen hadn’t caught a single fish. Then I saw why. The pair of anglers were using heavy rods, the same ones they use for catfishing. They had 12-pound test line on their baitcasting reels. I watched for awhile and saw that on several occasions they had a light strike and didn’t know it. The successful fisherman I checked was using 2-pound test line in the clear water and had an ultralight rod and reel. It made all the difference between catching fish and going home fishless.

No matter which fish you go after; catfish, walleye, trout, bluegill crappie or carp, it pays dividends to have the know how to catch your share of fish and along with the fish you will catch is limitless memories.