May 2011 will not be forgotten by anyone connected with the Mississippi River. While a few historians claim the lower Mississippi River has been higher, the 2011 flood set a new high-water record on the Vicksburg gauge, and was just inches shy of record highs on the Greenville and Memphis gauges. The social and economic damage were huge. […]
Ask a bass angler after a subpar fishing trip what they think management needs to do to improve the fishing, and the answer almost always will be “stock fish.” […]
It’s the time of the year when white bass, striped bass and hybrid striped bass group up and chase shad, often corralling them near the surface where they have nowhere to escape. “Schooling” whites, stripes and hybrids can make for some exciting fishing on late afternoons in the summer. Catching these schooling, lure-crushing fish has salvaged more than a few of my black bass outings after sweating through a long Mississippi summer day for only a couple of bites. […]
Summer is upon us. Water temperatures in most of Mississippi’s lakes and streams are in the mid 80s, and they’ll get warmer before they get cooler. A lot of bass and crappie tournaments happen during this warm-water season, and a lot of bass and crappie die. […]
Hand grappling. Grapplin’. Noodling. Hand fishing. Call it what you will, it is a deeply rooted passion for some adventuresome anglers and a flashpoint for others. […]
Crappie are notoriously cyclic. A lake is producing fair to good numbers of slabs for a couple years and then, mysteriously, the big fish disappear and are replaced with abundant but small fish. […]
Is there a crappie angler out there who doesn’t want to catch a lot of large crappie? […]
With an average annual rainfall of almost 60 inches, Mississippi is the third wettest state in the U.S. Much of that rain falls in late winter and early spring. While filling the rivers, streams and reservoirs that provide bountiful fisheries, the rains negatively affect fisheries by transporting erodible soils from the watershed into fishable waters. […]
Largemouth bass abound in Mississippi’s coastal rivers and marshes. Unfortunately, growth is slow, and fish over 3 pounds are rare. Why, in these food-rich systems where redfish grow to several pounds in their fist year of life, is slow growth of marsh largemouth a reality and large bass a rarity? […]
Call them what you will — Appaloosa, goujon, yellow cat, shovelhead, mud cat or any of a half dozen other names — the flathead catfish is rightfully the king of the aquatic jungle. While they share some characteristics with blue and channel cats, they are, in many ways, a different breed of cat. […]
Hydrilla is a significant component of the habitat in several world-class bass fisheries — places like Fork, Guntersville, Seminole and Toledo Bend. […]
As great as the fishing is in the fall, some lakes deal anglers a bad hand for a brief period when the lake “turns over.” Why some lakes have fall turnover, why some don’t, and why it can adversely affect fishing requires an understanding of stratification. […]
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