A short outing at the Lake of the Ozarks is in the cards

I am going back to some of my roots and fish few hours at the Lake of the Ozarks with John and Roger Kehde of Sedalia, Missouri, and Rick Heberstreit of Shawnee, Kansas, who is our cousin.

Back in the good old days of our youth in the 1960s and 1970s, we always spent the third week of April on the Gravois Arm of the Lake of the Ozarks.  And there were countless days at other times of the year, stemming back to the late 1940s, that we were  afloat upon its 54,000 surface acres or walking its 1,150 miles of shorelines or wading one its many tributaries.  But for a variety of reasons that are too numerous for us to detail, those days have gone by the wayside.

Rick Hebenstreit and his wife, Kathy, will be afloat from April 17 to April 23 on the Niangua arm rather than our old haunts on the Gravois arm. On April 19, John Kehde, Roger Kehde, and I will join them in hopes of inveigling a variety of species with our Midwest finesse tactics. Afterwards, we hope to write a detailed log about our endeavors for the "Midwest Finesse Fishing: April 2016" column, which will be published in May. The weather forecasters, however, are telling us that there is an 80 percent chance that Mother Nature will waylay us with thunderstorms from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on April 19, and if that scenario takes place, it might keep us old codgers at bay.

Nevertheless, we will not publish a Midwest Finesse column until our return from our Lake of the Ozark get together on April 20. And that column will be a 17,032-word column featuring how Rick Allen of Dallas; Norman Brown of Lewisville, Texas;  Lou Clewell of Roselyn, Pennsylvania;Steve Desch of Topeka, Kansas; Brent Frazee of Parkville, Missouri; Bob Gum of Kansas City, Kansas; Rick Hebenstreit of Shawnee, Kansas; Pok-Chi Lau of Lawrence, Kansas; Ralph Manns of Rockwall, Texas; Travis Myers of Paw Paw, West Virginia;  Mike Poe of Siler City, North Carolina; Steve Reideler of Denton, Texas; Joel Schroeder of Overland Park, Kansas; Brian Waldman of Coatesville, Indiana; and I caught our various quarries during the 31 days of March.