Dablemont: Kayak fishing a new adventure

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July 14, 2012

Dablemont: Kayak fishing a new adventure

By Larry Dablemont The Joplin Globe The Joplin Globe Sat Jul 14, 2012, 11:33 PM CDT

In the next couple of weeks I will do something I have never done before. I am going to fish out of a kayak.

Several companies are now making kayaks for fishermen, and the one I will try first is made by a company called Nu-Canoe out of Washington. Having no experience with kayaks whatsoever, I don’t know what to expect, but I will be writing about it soon. The only problem is, these are one-person crafts, and I am use to fishing with friends. Maybe I can put someone on an inner tube with a spinning rod and pull them behind me!

This will be great, I think, for seeking out an isolated place or two on the river and fishing with topwater lures or buzz-baits in July and August and September. Big smallmouth can be found in waters which are fairly small this time of year. The drought has our rivers at all-time low levels, and they retreat to deeper holes below those shallow shoals.

When you recall that I was guiding float fishermen when I was 12 or 13 years old out of handmade wooden johnboats built by my grandfather and dad, this kayak idea is coming a long, long ways. I paddle a canoe or johnboat from one side, and with a sassafras paddle I can make them do whatever I want. Friends and I always laugh at those folks who come zig-zagging down the river, paddling on one side, then another, switching back and forth in order to stay in the middle of the stream. They travel twice as far to get there as some who can paddle straight from one side, but it is nearly impossible today to find someone really good with a boat paddle.

A friend of mine told me the other day that he thinks the day of the canoe rentals and hordes of floaters choking the rivers may be limited. He says he thinks the crowded situations, and so much drunkenness and drug use amongst those weekenders we refer to as the capsize and chaos crowd, will chase families away.

“I think people will get tired of being in the crowd,’’ he said. “All the gravel bars strewn with toilet paper kind of turn folks off.

“Besides that, how many times does it take to experience it completely, when that’s all it amounts to.’’

The canoe rental people that I have met aren’t much interested in any long-term goal of preserving our streams in a wild state. Most of them didn’t even come from the Ozarks, they just saw a chance to make some big money. They bulldoze roads into the river, set up crowded campgrounds, and literally put canoes in the river end to end. It is a case of get all the money you can any way you can.

There is nothing poorer for river floating than those double-end, narrow 15- to 17-foot canoes. They are unstable and handle poorly because there is so much space behind the paddler. In the 1970s my uncle and I were guiding float-fishermen in Arkansas using 18- to 19-foot square-sterned canoes, and they were very efficient for a guide and two fishermen. In the early ‘80s the Lowe company out of Lebanon, Mo. began making a 17-foot aluminum paddle johnboat designed much like the old wooden johnboats from the early half of the century. Those boats were great for float-fishing, the only disadvantage being the noise of the aluminum on shallow shoals, and the fact that they wouldn’t slide very well over that gravel.

Plastics-based canoes, which have come along in the past 10 or 15 years, slide through those gravel shoals much better, but again, the majority of them are too short, too narrow, and have the pointed, long stern. My friend Dennis Whiteside, who guides fishermen on rivers of the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks, found a company making those Kevlar canoes much wider with squared-sterns, and he uses them on smaller streams where shoals do not carry as much water.

Canoe companies and the kayak companies make too many red and yellow crafts, and that is the kind of thing that riles us old-time grizzled outdoorsmen. Why would anyone want to make all kind of noise on a peaceful stream and be seen a mile away? The river is a serene, sacred place and you should blend in. Thankfully, the Nu-Canoe kayak I will be using is a dark, gray-green.

One of the reasons that is important to me is that I will be hunting ducks out of it this fall, trying to camouflage it as much as possible. Years ago, Truman Lake provided some of the best duck hunting I have ever experienced. It was new, and you could wade out into the lake and stand up against a big tree in flooded water, and hunt effectively. Today, the lake has silted in so badly you can’t wade out to any tree without sinking down into the mud so deep you can’t get back to shore. I am thinking that a well camouflaged, short kayak which you can sit low enough in, will be a very good way to hunt ducks.

Happy birthday, Bolt

Remember last year when I wrote about a new chocolate-colored Labrador puppy I was raising.

Well, that pup, which I call Bolt, is a year old, and I think he may be up there with the very best I have ever raised. I can’t wait to take him on serious duck hunts this fall. He has a strong desire to hunt, and retrieve. He retrieved a young possum for me a week or so ago. The possum was playing dead, and Bolt didn’t put a mark on him.

Bolt’s mother had a new litter recently and we have some 6-week old siblings romping in the back yard, which Bolt can’t quite figure out. Hopefully they will be much like him. In 40 years of raising Labradors, I have only had a handful of dogs that are of the quality of this young male that sits beside my desk when I work and sleeps beside my bed on his rug, stretched out on his back like a human. If you will check my website, you can see photos of him a year ago and a photo of him now.

Common Sense Conservationists

I have people asking me often about the progression of our organization we call “Common Sense Conservationists.’’ We are working hard to put together a newsletter, and to get on that mailing list you need to send your name and address to CSC, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.

We are a group trying to change some things about how the Missouri Department of Conservation operates and spends money, and hoping in time to defend wrongly accused Ozark outdoorsmen who find local courts unavailable to them due to the cost of a lawyer’s service. This newsletter gives our members a voice, and you can use it, too. Contributions are appreciated, but we do not require a membership fee. Our money will be spent to publish that newsletter and pay for postage.

It is easy to set up a local CSC group — just contact me and we will help start one in your area. Our next attempt at that will be in Stone County on Monday night, July 16 at the W and W Restaurant in Hurley, Mo. If you are close, please join us there between 6:30 and 7:30 that night.