If you have the ambition to get away from the air conditioning and get your body acclimated to summer, find an isolated section of Ozark river where canoe rental people do not operate, and plan a two- or three-day trip in the middle of the week with a friend who is inclined not to complain much about sleeping in a tent and having wet feet.

By doing so, you can actually get off away from the world’s problems. Float downstream and find a gravel bar or sand bar to camp on, where there is some shade of course. In the cool of the evening, find a deep shoal and wade out up to your waist above it or below it and cast a topwater minnow or a little popper of some kind with a spin-casting outfit or maybe even a fly-rod. There will be bass waiting to jump all over that lure, I’ve seen it happen! I have been there and done that, often.

When it gets dark, push your boat or canoe out into a big eddy fed by that river current, where there’s some deep water and rocks, and fish without lights, letting your eyes become accustom to the night. Cast a jitterbug toward the bank with a casting reel and a stronger line, and work it steadily across the surface. If there’s a big bass anywhere close, he will jump all over that jitterbug. This time of year, the rock bank towards the upper end of the eddy where the current feeds it will hold the smallmouth, but the lower sections of a big deep hole, on the opposite bank where there might be logs and limbs, are where you will find river largemouth, and they can’t pass up a jitterbug either.

If a nearby eddy is good and deep and has a bluff, chances are there’s a big flathead catfish there, or several, maybe up to 25 or 35 pounds. I have caught a few catfish from small Ozark rivers that exceeded 40 pounds. Flatheads can be caught on trotlines set deep, across the eddy and baited with LIVE bait, like chubs or sunfish, or even small suckers. There are channel catfish in many streams too, and they will take nightcrawlers or dead bait, minnows or even chicken livers.

It takes a lot of work to set and bait a trotline, and it involves some danger, as you can get entangled or hooked and pulled under by a weighted line. Have two sheathed knives on your belt to cut yourself free if you need to. If you set trotlines and run them in that deep water, DO NOT DO IT FROM A KAYAK OR SMALL CANOE. I would never ever trotline from a seventeen-foot double end canoe! Actually, I wouldn’t even float the river in one.

I know it is hot, but I am tired of staying inside. I have fishing to do, and I have missed it. I don’t know that it was as hot when I was a youngster, fishing up and down the Big Piney River in July and August. There was no reason to hole up in the house, because we didn’t have air conditioning, and maybe everyone could stand the heat better because of that fact.

Maybe air conditioning has us in a destructive grip as much as anything else. None of us would choose to live without it, but I know that another generation of men who lived without it stayed outside more and could take the summer much, much better. Of course our ancestors were tougher… they had to be. Thank goodness they were when the world war came along.

I have fished all through July and August with good results and as a teenager guiding float fishermen on the Big Piney and Gasconade, I never let a 95-degree day never stop a day long fishing trip. My clients would show up and we would start very early in the morning, when it was cooler. But we would float the river all day at times, always catching fish, even in the middle of the day. Of course, the river was more shaded then, because landowners hadn’t started clearing the banks of shade trees as much back then. There were a lot fewer cattle too. The river had much more water in those times, and it was much cleaner. Shady gravel bars offered great places to stop and relax, and swim in a cool river current for a little while. Then it was back to fishing, casting to whatever shaded bank there was, where the water had a little current and a little depth.

I am dreaming now, as this may be the first summer ever that I have not camped on a gravel bar. I can’t hardly walk right now, as a surgeon who was suppose to fix a torn meniscus botched the operation and made my knee worse than it was before. But I have hopes that a new operation soon will get me capable of taking to the river by duck season.

My website is www.larrydablemont.com, and you can e-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613 and if you want to get a copy of my new book or my summer magazine, just call me at 417-777-5227.