My good friend and fishing companion Dennis Whiteside floated and fished an Ozark river last week during the heat with his son Ryan. He says he saw the biggest smallmouth he has ever seen, well over 6 pounds.
He was hooked well, but cleared water and threw the hook, like the big ones do. 
I know right where that big bass is, and I am sitting here thinking about going after him soon, or maybe in September.

The Missouri Department of Conservation has announced plans to expand the Larry R. Gale access area to accommodate more visitors.

 Missouri Department of Conservation Resource Forester Michael Norris had difficulty nominating this year’s Missouri Logger of the Year Award winner. The problem was not lack of qualified nominees. He simply ran out of superlatives to describe the work of Larry Young.
Young became Missouri’s second Professional Logger of the Year receiving his award from State Forester Lisa Allen at the Missouri Forest Products Association’s annual meeting July 26 at Lake of the Ozarks

If you have never spent a night fishing, you have missed something.  You can’t imagine how bad you can feel at five or six a.m. if you haven’t ever been fishing all night! 
Bass boat owners like to fish the lakes at night in the summer with jig and pork combinations or plastic worms.  I have done a great deal of that and it produces some good bass.

 There is much lore in the outdoor world, especially for anglers, some is myth, some is superstition and some are valid prophecies. Anglers are interested in the weather because of its effect on fish behavior. 

Some ecological threats are subtle, hardly drawing any notice except in scientific circles. Then there is the northern snakehead, an exotic invader so obviously evil it is difficult not to recoil in horror. At least that is what Missouri officials hope.

Little has changed in the fishing report except a thermocline has developed at 14 to 16-feet throughout most of the lake.

Bass Strategies With Skeet Reese
To watch the average bass tournament, often the outcome is so often decided on who finds the best stretch of bank. But what happens when the shallow bite isn’t there? Where do you go when the fish have closed the bank?

The latest effort to restore prairie chickens to western Missouri is a two-phase reintroduction program. Phase one began in late March, when Missouri biologists and volunteers traveled to the Smoky Hills region of central Kansas, where prairie chickens still thrive. There they began trapping the stocky, foot-tall birds. They focused their efforts on “leks,” flat, sparsely vegetated hilltop sites where generations of prairie chickens have gathered to perform their annual mating rituals each spring.

I’ve always considered myself fortunate to live at a place that people save their money all year to come visit on vacation. I still do, although I don’t always visit the many things there are to do around Lake of the Ozarks when I take time off. In fact, I spent last week headed in the other direction, most often west of the lake, submerged in one of the cool, clear rivers that feed into the lake. I fished, therefore I am.

When you think of global warming and its impacts on fish and wildlife, species like elk, mule deer, antelope and moose aren’t the ones that always come to mind.
 But natural-resource officials say America’s beloved big-game species are acutely at-risk in what wildlife professionals from numerous agencies and organizations say is a changing global environment.

 Some took home cash prizes, and some collected titles, but every racer who completed the third Missouri River 340 won something beyond price - membership in the elite group who can say they finished the world’s longest nonstop river race.