Photo by Ron Sinfelt

That Lake Taneycomo is an awesome fishery is beyond dispute. The southern Missouri lake, famous nationwide for its trout fishing, has some of the best brown trout to be had anywhere; the rainbows are nothing to sneeze at, either. And this month, when the temperatures at many lakes are quite toasty, this coldwater impoundment is the place to be.

No one has to tell that to Phil Lilley (www.ozarkanglers.com), owner and operator of Lilley's Landing, one of the top resorts and marinas on the lake. The businessman and avid trout angler will readily apprise you that anglers can expect to catch many trout, many of them big, at Taneycomo today. But the situation wasn't always so good here.

The impoundment began life in 1913, when the Power Site dam (owned by the Empire Electric Company and sited near the town of Forsyth) was built on the White River at Mile Marker 506.8. Then, in 1958, the dam at Table Rock was completed, and 45 years after the creation of what had until then been just a run-of-the-mill warmwater fishery, things began to change. In short order, the new structure at Mile Marker 528.8 transformed Taneycomo into a coldwater lake. The credit for that goes to the frigid waters churning through Table Rock's generators, which radically reduced the average temperature of the water almost overnight.

Along with the change in temperature came alterations in the physical characteristics of the impoundment. Table Rock brought into being a long, narrow, winding body of water unlike most others of its sort in the state. In some ways, Taneycomo ended up resembling more a river than a lake, having stretched out to a length of 22 miles.

Bill Anderson, fisheries biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, grew up in the area, and so knows the lake well. He says that by 1986, when he took up his duties at the lake, what he found there was heartbreaking. As a dedicated trout angler, he was dismayed to realize that the big rainbows he remembered were now no longer than 10 inches; that hardly compared to the 16-inch fish that he'd been accustomed to as a youth. The fishing was so bad that he actually stopped for a time. That's no small thing for Bill Anderson.

As a biologist he wanted to do something about it: something to restore the fishery to what it once had been. Sure, it was his job -- but as an angler, he felt it more as his calling.

Early on, he knew (or at least strongly suspected) that the average lifespan of a stocked rainbow was short in Taneycomo. That hunch couldn't prepare him, however, for what his studies would show: A stocked rainbow at Taneycomo could look forward, on average, to 30 days between disorientedly entering and fatally exiting the lake's waters. Little or no opportunity for growth there -- at best, maybe a half-inch; obviously, not enough to make a significant difference.

After careful study, Anderson and the MDC designed a plan that they felt would boost both the population in general and the size of individual specimens within that population. The first measure taken established a Trophy Management Area on the upper end of the lake that runs from the dam at Table Rock to the mouth of Fall Creek.