TOSA 2010-11 meeting season

[Eugene]

One of my responsibilities within The Ohio Smallmouth Alliance is to coordinate presenters at our monthly meetings. We meet on third Thursdays, September through April, skipping December for the holidays.

I think it’s a given that I will persuade somebody from the ODNR Division of Wildlife to close our presentation season and stoke us up to hit the water with an update on their stream sampling program in spring 2011. It has been a couple years since we had the Ohio EPA speak on their bioassessment sampling and the smallmouth catches therein; I'm planning to have that reprised in the coming season.

That will leave five dates to fill. I am willing to fill them without your input, but my personal contacts are mostly resource managers or academic scientists. Some other thoughts I have are a reprise of the presentation on who owns Ohio's waters by the ODNR Division of Soil & Water Resources, an update on Ohio's Water Trails program, artificial reefs in Lake Erie, fisheries outreach programming by my own Ohio Sea Grant office, etc.

I would much rather these meetings be interesting to you, the membership at large and the general smallmouth fishing public. If you have any ideas of topics you'd like to see covered or even of specific speakers, please let me know ASAP. If you happen to have contact info for potential specific speakers, please send it to me via private message at this forum.

I look forward to hearing from you all.

[Eugene]

One more thought: our host, Gander Mountain, keeps pro staff on payroll. An update by Gander Mountain pros on new products and techniques appropriate to smallmouth is good to do on occasion. Thoughts?

[Kyle Kochheiser]

I was just thinking about this the other day. I love the stuff you have come up with so far especially the "Who owns the Waterway?", the Water Trail & the Erie reef stuff. I was also wondering about a May meeting. The summer gap seems kind of long. I know fishing really picks up in May so attendance can be tricky to get, but it seems a more logical fill choice than August. Maybe an agenda item to discuss at the Sept meeting.

[smead]

Sounds like interesting subject material...regretablely, I work 11-12 hour nights Thu-Sun...and your meetings are on Thursdays.

[Eugene]

Alas! I hope you find an occasional break and might be able to hit one sometime in the future. Even if not, do feel free to ask for info from those talks here, of course. Most attendees will be happy to share.