Just after high noon on the drought-starved Missouri River near Jefferson City, we spot a whole mess of ’em piping away at the surface of the water. Johnboat
captain Neil Guinn cuts his trolling motor, and we drift in for the big kill.
“Look at ’em all,” says Steve Howard. “There’re tons of ’em. We’re going to have to do a
countdown on this one.”
Despite my glaring deficiencies as a greenhorn to my new favorite sport, Neil and Steve
graciously accept me as their teammate in the Missouri Valley Archery Rough Fish Roundup bowfishing tournament.
No more than 20 yards in front of us is a school of river menace Number One: silver
carp, an invasive species of the Asian variety threatening to wreak havoc on the Missouri
River’s ecosystem. They are such a hazard that the Missouri Department of Conservation
suggests fishermen do not throw them back alive. It’s even illegal to use Asian carp as live
bait. MDC’s fear is that the carp will get transported to other bodies of water in the state.
When it comes to silver and bighead carp, another variety of Asians, the motto is simple:
Exterminate the brutes.
In recent years their population has exploded and given biologists cause for real concern. However, the silver carp’s freshwater blitzkrieg has become a windfall for bowfishermen across Missouri. And it just may be what catapults the sport out of its barbaric redneck reputation and into the public’s popular conscience as not only an action-packed way
to spend an afternoon on the river but a thrilling form of conservation.
“Alright, when we get up on ’em, let’s each of us pick one out,” says Neil, a 29-year-old
document control specialist sporting a camouflage T-shirt and backward Cardinals hat.
Brief showers and overcast conditions diminished visibility earlier in the morning and
turned the water’s surface into a mirror. But at this moment the clouds part, the sun blazes
down, and our polarized sunglasses reveal myriad black silhouettes underwater, feeding
at the top.
Steve, a 33-year-old laboratory instrument specialist, is strapped with his faithful
Browning compound bow equipped with a Zebco 808 fishing reel wound with fast flight
200-pound test line. Neil wields a Black Bear compound, a $40 eBay find he set up with a
$150 AMS triggered retriever reel with neon orange line. I have my loaner, a camouflage
PSE Elite compound with a retriever similar to Neil’s, only my line is chartreuse.
“Remember, aim low,” whispers Neil. Because of the refraction factor of the water, the
fish appear to be higher than they actually are. It’s an optical illusion, like how a drinking
straw seems to bend when it’s stuck in a glass of water. To compensate, Bowfishing 101
instructs shooters to aim six to eight inches below the fish.
Lined three abreast on the boat’s bow, we each take a deep breath and draw our bows.
“One, two...,” I say. “THREE!”
Taut bow strings thwack, and our arrows zing through the air. Lines unspool in a helical,
neon hiss. Neil broadsides a silver, as do I. Steve, our boat’s sharpshooter, comes up with
a rare miss. As the fish Neil and I speared buck and contort, the remaining school of carp
dart in every direction, turning the water into a matrix of dorsal-finned getaways.
My retriever begins chewing up line, so I set down the bow and pull the line in, hand
over hand. Neil has his fish in the boat first. He pulls up the skewered carp, grabs the arrow’s shaft, and twists its tip to flip the V-shaped barbs so the fish slip easily into our boat’s
40-gallon plastic drum, a staple of every bowfishing vessel. My line is a tangled cat’s cradle,
so Neil lends me a hand, flipping my arrow’s barbs and directing my kabobbed carp into
the bucket.
“Nice shot,” Neil says, giving me a fist bump before wiping carp innards on his
cargo shorts.
lining
Bowfishermen take aim at invasive carp.
[44] MissouriLife
don shrubshell
silver
From the bow of his boat, Guy Lanphere fires
a shot at a silver carp, an invasive species
threatening the Missouri River.
BY NIC HALVERSON
[45] October 2012
don shrubshell
Lined three abreast on the
boat’s bow, we each take a deep
breath and draw our bows.
[46] MissouriLife
Once the clouds return, any hope I had of offering a worthwhile contribution to my team vanishes. The wind picks up, turning the water
into a choppy mirage.
Even with my polarized shades, I struggle to see fish. Steve, on the
other hand, is a deadeye marksman.
“I think after you see your first half dozen or so, you can focus in on
what color the fish gives off in the water,” says Steve. “If it’s not on the
surface, you have to be looking for something else.”
Steve finds ‘something else’ when he spears a three-foot, 10-pound
longnose gar, a relic of the prehistoric age and a native species classified by MDC as a rough fish, thus making it fair game for bowfishermen. The teeth of the torpedo-shaped gar are sharp as broken glass. Its
hard ganoid scales make the fish well-fortified against the few predators it counts as enemies. Touching a gar feels like running your hand
over a plate of tiled armor. In fact, Native Americans used their scales
as arrowheads. They’re a fierce fish and not to be underestimated, especially while thrashing around in a small, tipsy boat.
Once Steve gets the gar in the boat, Neil steps up with his best form
of protection against its sharp teeth: a pink hand towel.
“Ouch!” Neil yells as he wraps the towel around the gar’s snout. He
then enlists the help of a sawed-off push broom handle to thump the
gar on its head in a vignette of violence.
“That’s pillow talk you hear,” Steve says.
As he removes the arrow and dumps the lifeless gar into the drum,
Neil raises a bloody hand.
“Looks like I’ll be picking gar teeth out of my hand all week,” he
says. “They’re like little needles that just flake off.”
Flesh wounds aside, Neil says bowfishing’s appeal is like no other.
“Even though there can sometimes be a lot of time between shooting fish, for me, you’re not just sitting there waiting for a hook to be
set,” he says.
Steve, a seasoned deer hunter, likes how bowfishing gives him more
time to hone his archery prowess. “There’s quite a bit of skill involved,”
he says. “And with the Asian carp, it’s good just to try and control their
population. So it’s kind of like a double positive.”
Although the region’s first bowfishing tournament of the summer,
the Mid-Mo Big 12 in June, was a contest of size, the Rough Fish
Roundup is strictly for numbers. Whichever team brings back the most
fish takes home first place and, more importantly, bragging rights.
“These numbers tournaments are great,” says Steve. “Any time you
can get a couple dozen guys to go out and kill as many Asian carp as
they can, that’s a great thing.”
Just as the Asian carp population has grown, so too has bowfishing’s
popularity. Steve says back when he was growing up, tournaments like
this didn’t exist. He doesn’t know if bowfishing can put a dent into the
Asian carp population, “but it’s fun to try.”
With woozy dehydration beginning to set in, compliments of eight
hours in shadeless triple-digit heat, we decide to call it a day.
A known sharpshooter, Guy Lanphere directs one of the many silver carp he’s shot on the Missouri
River into his boat so he can remove the arrow and put the fish in his 40-gallon plastic barrel.
We have 40 minutes to make it back to the 4 o’clock weigh-in. We
have 25 fish in the drum, all silver carp save for the gar: Steve shot 16,
Neil tagged eight, and I, the pathetic recruit, only shot one.
Steve’s white T-shirt looks like a Jackson Pollack painting, splattered with carp guts. Neil’s neck looks like a raw steak. Save for a few
flecks of guts on my shirt, I am fairly unscathed. Though after a day
of punishing sun, the aroma on the boat could wake the dead. It is a
dry-heaving medley of the worst kind: a miasma of rotting carp, the
omnipresent flatulence of the ‘carp whistle,’ and the ripe, toe-curling
body odor of stubbly river rats in dire need of a shower.
As Neil fires up the jet motor, a few silver carp leap in the boat’s
wake giving us a glimpse of their notorious calling card. The drone of
boat motors startles the carp and causes them to vault out of the water
like kamikaze acrobats. Silver carp can grow up to 40 pounds and are
capable of jumping 10 feet in the air, which can make boating on the
river less about recreation and more about dodging slimy projectiles
that weigh as much as a big bag of dog food. I’ve heard stories of boaters using metal garbage can lids as shields.
However, Neil says this epidemic gives him and other bowfishermen the green light to be greedy.
“I’m kind of selfish about the problem. It’s really given us an abundance of fish,” he says. “How many regular carp did we see today?
One. How many Asian carp did we see? Thousands. While that’s great
for our sport, it’s bad for the riverways of Missouri.”
Asian carp were introduced into the United States in the early 1970s
to harvest them for food and use them for biological water control
because they like to nosh on undesirable bluegreen algae.
“You see in the media that the floods of the early ’90s caused the
escape of these fish. That’s really not the story,” says Duane Chapman, a research fish biologist for the U.S. Department of Geological
Survey. “The fish got loose almost immediately.”
Duane began studying Asian carp in the mid ’80s. A few years
later, other biologists started to recognize the dilemma.
“They started saying, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of bighead carp out here;
what’s going on? These things could be a problem,’ ” says 53-yearold Duane.
Duane still remembers his first encounter.
“The first silver I ever saw in Missouri was in 2000 on the Lamine
River,” he says. “I saw a bunch of fish jumping. I thought they were
gizzard shad. I threw out a cast net and, what do you know, they
weren’t gizzard shad. As soon as I got them into the boat, I knew
immediately what they were. I said right away, ‘This is a potential
problem.’ ”
Fishes with the highest risk of being threatened are those with pelagic early life history, which means they live near the surface in open
water when they are very young.
“Yellow perch, walleye, white bass, crappie—these are fishes that
have pelagic early life stages,” Duane says. “Their young eat zooplankton out in the water column. If you get a big Asian carp population
[47] October 2012
[48] MissouriLife
nic halverson
Top: Steve Howard, foreground, lands his first silver carp during the Missouri Valley
Archery Rough Fish Roundup. Neil Guinn, background, scans the water for signs of fish.
Bottom: A staple of every bowfishing boat is a 40-gallon plastic drum to collect fish.
If the bowfishing community of central Missouri had a face, it would be
Guy Lanphere’s. The gregarious, laid-back 33-year-old may be uncomfortable with assuming such a figureheaded role, but that’s only because
he’s teeming with the kind of reluctant modesty native of the Midwest.
As organizer of the Missouri Valley Archery Rough Fish Roundup—
the fifth bowfishing tournament he’s spearheaded in the last three years
—Guy is the man behind the curtain. He’s a tireless workhorse and a
nic halverson
out there, there’s not going to be anything for those little crappie to eat.”
Other kinds of fishes potentially affected by Asian carp are gizzard
shad, buffalo fish (commonly called buffalo carp), and paddlefish.
Duane credits last year’s heavy snowfall and summer rain, piggybacked
with this year’s low water, for creating the perfect conditions for a silver
carp explosion.
“High water is excellent for baby Asian carp and spawning,” he says.
“With the past two years’ high water, we had big Asian carp that basically
expended all their energy into making babies. What we have now are a
bunch of small juveniles.
“When you get a low water year like this, there’s some retention time
behind those wind dikes. The turbidity falls out. This is a really bizarre
year because of the clarity we’re seeing. As soon as the river slows down
enough to produce algae, then conditions really get good for Asian carp.”
Normally, this isn’t so. “The Missouri River, overall, is a crappy habitat
for Asian carp,” Duane says.
The Missouri River typically runs fast and muddy, and the plankton
and phytoplankton can’t grow in the mud. However, this year’s absence
of rain has created ideal conditions for plankton to survive.
“The Missouri River in general is very turbid,” Duane says. “Asian
carp’s favorite food is plankton. You have to have light penetration to
grow the phytoplankton.”
But Missouri’s freshwater ecosystems aren’t the only ones facing danger. “If you’re a fisherman, you’ve got a problem,” Duane says. “You have
fish flying through the air. They break things and hurt people.”
However, Duane is quick to dish advice.
“I would really recommend that anybody on the river think about
your throttle mechanism and where it is,” he says. “Most fish jump in
the back third of the boat. If it hits it on the front or back of the throttle
mechanism, it’ll slam it into gear. The boat reacts dramatically, especially
if you got 150 horses on the back.”
Duane speaks from experience. On one fish-tracking expedition on a
creek, a leaping carp slammed the throttle down and floored it. The boat
ended up at a 45-degree angle up a mud bank.
“It left everybody clinging to the transom,” Duane says. “Next day we
built a throttle protector.”
To stay on the forefront of where the Asian carp are popping up next,
Duane says he trolls the message boards of the men on point.
“I frequent the bowfishing Web pages because bowfishermen have another viewpoint,” Duane says. “These guys are out looking for fish, and
they see them more than other people. When these carp show up in a
new place, often it’s the bowfishermen that find them.”
marksmen that were part of the last tourverbose outdoorsman blessed with the
nament’s winning team, the trio fits the
twin gift of not only speaking the downprofile of a bowfishing dream team.
home language of the most backwater
Guy and company murder the comhillbilly but being articulate enough to
petition, bagging first place with 68 fish,
navigate the savvy public discourse necesmostly silver carp.
sary for organizing major events, wooing
“When we were floating by the wind
sponsors, and being a media spokesman
dikes today, we could literally look over
for the sport.
the other side and see hundreds of fish all
“Bowfishing doesn’t really have a lot of
piping on top,” says Guy, an electronics
people that are taking charge and doing
salesman.
stuff,” Neil says. “Guy’s taken it to a new
Thanks entirely to Neil and Steve,
level.”
my
team takes home an honorable sixth
Besides being a hospitable ambassador,
John Richards, “The Turtle Man,” tosses one of the tournament’s
place with our 25 fish. For Guy, that’s a
Guy’s greatest asset to bowfishing just may silver carp into his truck’s trailer. Richards networks with
bowfishermen, using fish from their tournaments to feed the
job well done.
be his ability to turn curious newcomers
snapping turtles he breeds and sells on his farm.
“Look at all those smiles out there today.
on to the sport. Of the handful of bowThat’s what does it for me,” he says. “When we came back together,
fishermen I aim low with, the common denominator of their bowfisheveryone was laughing, cutting up, and telling fish stories that were
ing origin stories always began with Guy.
bigger than any of the fish brought in.”
“I got into bowfishing three years ago,” Neil says. “It was late in the
But when it comes to silver carp, a fish Guy refers to as “the mice of
season, so I only got to go one time. Next spring I was ready to go. I
the river,” he takes a more serious tone.
had all my gear. I was just waiting for the weather to change.”
“They’re never going away. I think they’re here to stay,” Guy says.
Back at archery outfitter Missouri Valley Archery’s parking lot in
“It’
s unfortunate, but as bowfishing continues to grow, I think a lot of
Jefferson City, Guy is wearing two hats at the weigh in. As the tourpeople are going to realize how worthy an opponent and worthy a speney organizer he is calling the shots, corralling the 16 registered teams
cies it is to target these silver carp.”
and orchestrating a muddle of trailer-hitched boats into an orderly seA worthy opponent, indeed, but Guy says it’s an even tastier meal.
quence. The other hat he dons: tournament participant on Team Holy
“Every
one of these fish are going to the turtles today,” he says, “but
Shoot.
I’ll tell you what, there were a couple in that bucket that I wish I were
“Alright everyone, gather ’round. The Turtle Man is on his way,”
taking home for myself. They eat good.
Guy hollers, cupping his hands around his mouth. “What I want y’all
“Maybe one of the reasons bowfishing still seems exotic is that, if
to do is drive your trucks down around the building to the bottom of
you
tell someone you eat carp, you’ve just knocked yourself down
the hill. That’s where we’ll do the fish count.”
about eight levels on the socioeconomic scale. You’re written off.”
Moments later, John Richards, a.k.a. The Turtle Man, pulls into the
What Guy says people fail to realize is that silver carp are not botlot wearing a black bandanna and shades. His truck tows a flatbed
tom feeders like other carp.
trailer with a bin on it the size of a small swimming pool. John, 53, is
“They strain feed. They eat the fine plankton,” he espouses. “If
picking up breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the more than 1,000 hunyou were to look down inside their throat, it looks the same as a gigry mouths he has to feed back on his farm in Stratford.
ant baleen whale. They’re not going around scooping up trash off the
“I breed and sell snapping turtles—both kinds—alligator snapping
bottom. They’re not rooting around in the turtle holes. They’re a big
turtles, common snappers, and soft shell turtles,” he says, puffing on
schooling fish like you would see in the ocean.”
his ever-present cigar. “For years I used to feed them chicken, but it
Helping Guy see the light was Duane Chapman, who showed him
just got problematic with limited quantity. Now they eat carp.”
how to properly filet the notoriously boney species.
Three years ago, John reached out to Missouri’s bowfishing com“I’m a convert. I have totally bought into silver carp being good eatmunity with a cost-effective proposal to feed the snappers that live in
ing,”
he says. “Now that I know how to do it, me and six guys can sit
his ponds. His pitch: You shoot the fish, I’ll buy ’em.
around and eat ’em until we’re so full we can’t drink anymore beer.”
“This is a good bunch of ecologically minded folks,” John says. “We
Tourney participants—some brandishing gaff hooks—continue
do have a real problem with these invasive fish, and this sport is good
to sloppily chuck their carp into the Turtle Man’s brimming barrel.
for thinning them out. Not that this is going to solve any problems,
John begins throwing frozen jugs of water onto the pile to ice down
but it doesn’t hurt.”
his cargo for the long ride home. Approximately 2,300 pounds—381
Since the tournament is a numbers-only round up, sticking big fish
fish—await his snappers.
isn’t a priority. A numbers-only platform caters to the slay-’em-early,
“You got a full load there,” I remark to John.
slay-’em-often philosophy, a mind-set that can only be backed up by
“Brother, that’s nothin’,” he says, chomping on his cigar. “Man, these
the best shooters. When Guy, known for his reputation as a sharpare just appetizers.”
shooter, joins forces with Jeff Thompson and Nathan Sizemore, two
[49] October 2012