Ozark Awesome Hunt & Fish Float

I often feel like I was born in the wrong century—except when I’m floating through wild country on a free-flowing river.

- Ron Kruger

Being able to combine canoeing, camping, hunting and fishing into an excursion that lasts days or even weeks at a time provides the ultimate outdoor enjoyment, and fall is my favorite season for this. I sit by the campfire on a gravel bar on a cool evening, and the experience is complete. I am captivated by moving water, especially the clear, spring-fed rivers that meander through the rugged Ozark Mountains.

Doc, my golden retriever, sits in the front of the canoe like a big hood ornament, providing ballast and also staying on the alert for anything that moves, anything he might retrieve. Should a pair of wood ducks flush and whistle away, Doc will shiver and whine. Then he looks back at me as if I failed him somehow. I tell him we’re in no hurry, no deadlines to make or appointments to keep, and he settles back into his post.

Smallmouth bass are abundant in these streams, and in the lively flows for which the Current River was aptly named, they fight as hard if not harder than anywhere else. Missouri boasts more smallmouth streams than any other state, and I believe the brown bomber should be the state fish, prominently displayed on the state flag and somehow worked into the state motto.

The Current River slides and rushes through timbered land like liquefied emeralds, rich bluish-green water that ushers from some of the largest springs in the world. The riffles sing a siren song, written in current seams by The Ultimate Composer. It seems inexpressibly appropriate that the native bronze back beauties inhabit such currents in country so awe-inspiring.