Al Agnew

And if you find the pontoon craft you have to be a pain to fish and navigate at the same time, you certainly won't gain anything with a drift boat. A drift boat is designed for one person to row and one or two others to fish in big, fast water. They are really nice on big western trout streams, but there are better choices for most of the rivers in the Midwest. A canoe (the RIGHT canoe) is the most versatile river fishing craft for midwestern streams. Some of the bigger WI and MI streams with lots of rocks and rapids are not suited very well to canoe use, but I'd think you'd be better able to adapt the canoe to many streams in that area than to adapt the driftboat to use in the IL streams you mention.

Geez, guys, one of the beauties of using a canoe is that you can carry lots of stuff! I carry 5 rods in the solo canoe (14 ft. Wenonah Vagabond) at all times. The trick is to experiment with how you'll carry the rods so that the tips are all inside the gunwales and the handles are within easy reach as you're floating. As long as you're reasonably prudent, and you're not floating class 2 or higher whitewater, you shouldn't even need to tie the extras down. I fish MO Ozark streams, and never tie the rods down. One thing...it really helps if you use shorter rods. None of my canoe rods is over 6 feet long, and most are 5.5 feet. Shorter rods fit in the canoe a lot better. I can lay two rods with handles on the supports of the bench seat on either side of me, supported by the thwart in front of me, and with tips up close to the front end of the canoe. I lay one--a 5 footer, it's my topwater rod (it's easiest to work walk-the-dog topwaters with a very short rod when you're in a canoe)--with the handle on the thwart in front and the tip still fits under the front end cap of the canoe. And two with handles resting on the bench seat supports facing backward, with tips under the rear end cap of the canoe. One idea I've seen that might be nice is to take some 3 inch PVC pipe, cut short sections, and fasten them where you want your rod tips to go (up against the gunwales or under the end caps). That way you can slide your rod tips into the PVC pipe sections, lures attached, and they wouldn't get tangled with each other. Another idea is to take short rubber bungee type cords and fasten them to the thwarts to hold down your rods as they lie across the thwarts. But I like to keep it simple, and just lay the rods down as I described.

Sorry I didn't get around to talking more about this during the presentation... The thing about the skirt on the belly hook is that on a few lures, including my homemade one and a couple that you can still buy, the skirt is absolutely necessary to make them work as shallow crankbaits. On these lures, the skirt acts as a balance point and changes the lure from a very irregular wobbler than MUST be fished very slowly to work at all, to a wide but fairly consistent wobbler that can be fished fast or slow. But on most normal crankbaits, the skirt tends to kill the wobble. I can make many deep diving crankbaits work well as long as the skirt is very sparse, and on some I've taken the rear treble off and moved the belly treble to a point about midway between where the two trebles were originally, and got them to wobble well. I think they do better than an unskirted crank, maybe simply because the fish haven't seen them like that much. I've also experimented with putting twin tail spinnerbait trailers on the belly hook of various crankbaits. Seems to work pretty well, but to make it work right you need to replace the treble with those ones that have the eye turned so that when you put it on the typical split ring, one hook points straight down and the other two lie evenly against the belly of the lure. You put the trailer on the hook pointing down, and it's perfectly balanced. Otherwise, it's always off center on normal trebles that are attached with split rings, and it makes the lure run erratically. The two lures that NEED the skirt: the Midge-oreno and the Baby Lucky 13, two very old lures that are still available but not always easy to find. One lure that works pretty well with the skirt even though it slightly kills the action--Mann's Baby One-Minus. Another old lure that you may stumble upon that works pretty well with the skirt is the Lazy Ike. One other thing...there IS a reason, other than those I just spoke of, why a skirt or something on the belly hook might work well. Think back on all the fish you've caught on crankbaits. How many of them were hooked on the belly treble? I'd bet most of them were. I've seen, both in the water and on underwater footage on TV, bass taking crankbaits by very precisely biting the swinging belly treble ONLY. By adding some attraction to the belly hook, you might be giving the fish a more attractive target.

I thought I felt my ears burning... Guys, the bucktail twin spin, as you know, is one of my absolute favorite lures. However, like any other lure, it's a tool that doesn't always fit the job. It's at its best in clear, warm water, where you fish it fast and just under the surface. On the clear Ozark streams, it's a deadly summertime lure, much better than a typical spinnerbait, but in colder water or when you need to go deeper I prefer a regular spinnerbait, and in really murky water the typical spinnerbait with big thumping blades will usually outfish the twin spin. As for bucktail itself, I make some regular spinnerbaits with bucktail, but I'm not convinced it's any better than a silicone skirt. It might work better at times because it does give the lure a different profile, and you can tie it using color combinations that might make it look more like some kind of baitfish--I tie them with olive green bucktail on top, gray and a bit of chartreuse on the sides, and white or cream on the bottom, to match a typical minnow color. Not sure it works any better but it looks pretty. In fact, even on the twin spins, I know guys who just use a bare Nugget twin spin with a curly tail grub, no skirt at all, and do well. I think the bucktail adds something, but I've used some of mine until most of the bucktail was worn off and they still caught fish like crazy--as long as they had that curly tail grub. So I guess I kinda think the grub trailer is even more important than the bucktail. I practically always dress ANY spinnerbait with a grub trailer--but my dad doesn't and he catches fish like crazy on the typical trailer-less spinnerbait. Go figure.

One of my favorite subjects! You would think that relatively few bass in lightly pressured streams get caught on a particular lure enough times to make that lure lose its effectiveness after a while. But I've seen it happen a number of times on my favorite stream. On the other hand, there are some baits that are truly magic, because they have stood the test of time and still catch fish just about everywhere. Could it be that when a particular new lure comes out, only a certain percentage of the bass are genetically programmed to be attracted to that lure in the first place? Say that only 20% of the fish are susceptible to the profile, action, and vibration of that lure when it first comes out. Those 20% get caught...maybe caught and harvested, maybe caught so many times that sooner or later they die of delayed mortality. So eventually they don't pass along those susceptibility genes to their offspring. Maybe that's why some lures are hot for a while and then go cold. On the other hand, maybe the lures that have been effective for many years have characteristics that attract nearly all the fish in the population. I too look upon lures as tools. My selection of lures is fairly limited, but covers the water from top to bottom, fast to slow, quiet to noisy. I try new lures based upon whether I think they might cover a need a little better than my current lure in that category does. I choose lures for the day based upon water conditions. On the other hand, I'm always looking for "different" lures, those that I KNOW that nobody else in my area has been using, and I also modify existing lures to make them somewhat different from what the fish have been seeing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I'm glad to answer your questions...wish we'd had more time to have a Q and A session. I work from my own photos, sketches on location, and color notes I make in my sketchbook--I take a lot of photos everywhere I go, especially these days with digital cameras. However, I can pretty well do smallmouth paintings from memory--I know about how many scales are in the lateral line, how many rays in the fins, etc. With familiar animals and fish, I only use the photos to check my details and make sure they are correct. On underwater settings I go mostly by memory--I've spent plenty of time snorkeling in Ozark streams. I seldom work on more than one painting at a time, but will sometimes be working on a catalog cover or magazine illustration at the same time I'm working on a painting. Actually, most of my Bass Pro Shops catalog covers and other illustrations are done entirely on the computer, using the drawing and painting tools on Photoshop. So I can work on them on the computer for a day or two when I get bogged down in a painting or need to finish them for deadlines. The time I spend upon a painting depends upon the size and complexity of the piece, but generally for a painting of the size of the smallmouth prints (16 X 24 inches), it will take me in the neighborhood of two weeks--something like 50-60 hours actual painting time. That doesn't include the time spent sketching and working out the composition. I work throughout the year. In the winter I tend to work 5 days a week, usually 6-7 hours a day. In the summer that drops to 4 days a week, with at least one weekday reserved for fishing! I'll usually go on one or two major resource gathering trips (like to Alaska, Africa, or various areas in the U.S.) per year. Mary and I will also spend about two months per year at our cabin in Montana, near Yellowstone Park--fishing time and reference gathering as well, but I also paint while I'm there. We usually go out for a couple weeks in late April, then for three weeks or so in mid-summer and three to four weeks in September and October. Nope, no special smallmouth bronze color. In painting, color of the subject is greatly dependent upon lighting and color of the background. Let me know if any of you have other questions, both about art and fishing. Al

I just wanted to thank everybody at the Blowout for the warm welcome and response to my talk. It's always great to get together with a bunch of smallmouth enthusiasts, and it was also great to be able to put faces to the names of those I've gotten to know on Riversmallies. Also, I'm happy to have won some stuff--I now have some good flies and if I can make myself put down the casting rods and actually flyfish seriously for smallies I should be well-equipped! Thanks again.... Al