Larry Dablemont

1 week ago | maryvilleforum.com | Larry Dablemont

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.

2 weeks ago | maryvilleforum.com | Larry Dablemont

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.

3 weeks ago | maryvilleforum.com | Larry Dablemont

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.

1 month ago | maryvilleforum.com | Larry Dablemont

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.

1 month ago | maryvilleforum.com | Larry Dablemont

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.