Al Agnew

Point is, though, that it WAS a mistake and not some secret nefarious agenda. Tell me...the law has been in effect for a while, and posted in lots of places. How many of you realized the type of plastic was wrong and didn't ban styrofoam until somebody finally caught it and pointed it out? How many people other than the legislators saw the law in print and never realized it? Get over it. And if you think there are enough MO legislators of either party to vote for something that backhandedly bans fishing in this state, you're probably delusional. Not to mention that if that was the reasoning behind that law, it was seriously flawed, since the people the law affects most directly are the canoe rental party crowd, not anglers. I just can't see getting your panties in a twist because of this...there are lots of stuff going on that are far, far worse.

Good to hear that they were smallmouth. I fear for the upper Bourbeuse, although so far the spotted bass haven't exploded in population above Noser Mill. In the stretches between Noser Mill and Union, it only took about 4 years for the spotted bass to increase from nothing to the point where they outnumbered smallmouth. The smallies on the upper Bourbeuse really get squeezed in the summer when the water gets low. They will always try to hang around current rather than staying in the dead pools, but the current areas really get shallow on the upper Bourbeuse. I'm not surprised you were finding them in shallow water.

The creek has some popular stretches. In fact, it may be one of the most popular creeks with the party crowd. But it isn't all a party river. The stretch is 13 miles or so. I do it once a year, usually about this time of year when the water is low enough that I'm pretty sure the party animals aren't going to be on the upper half of this float. It's a long way, but it's either do the 13 miles in a long day, or do just 6 or 7 miles, too short a float for a full day of fishing. So today was the day. I didn't decide that until I woke up this morning...not looking forward to getting into the studio and painting, weather supposed to be gorgeous, wife said go ahead. What choice did I have? Because I didn't plan it ahead of time, I got a late start. Didn't get on the creek until about 10:30 AM. I knew I'd be on it until nearly dark, but so what? Like I mentioned, the upper half is remote. The fishing is usually very good. So I was pretty disappointed to not catch much of anything in the first half-mile. So I started experimenting. Fished the fly rod with poppers and streamers, including a streamer I devised myself with a chamois curly tail that I was sure would catch fish. Nothing. Fished tubes. Nothing but a small smallmouth and some goggle-eye. Tried four different topwater lures. Buzzbait. Spinnerbait. My sinking walk-the-dog lure. Superfluke. All those things got a few strikes, but only from small fish. Nothing was working well. Oh, well, some days you win and some days you...win in a different way. Solitude. Beautiful stream. Water so clear it looked like pool water. Deer and vultures and hawks. Turtles. Minnows everywhere. Cool but sunny. The wind was a minus, but not that bad. The creek was flowing enough water that I didn't have to get out and drag, although I had to lift the solo canoe over a couple of logjams. A small price to pay for a day on a piece of remote creek. There were a few "fish" highlights in the first half of the float. Nearly all the fish I saw and caught were small, few of them much over 12 inches, but there was the occasional bigger fish that came out of the shadows and cover to investigate my various lures. One of them, which followed my buzzbait to within a few feet of the canoe, was a real horse, 20 inches or better. Another that was getting close to 20 struck my spinnerbait but didn't get hooked. I took my time on the upper half, knowing that once I passed the bridge in the middle I'd be on popular water, but figuring that I'd get there late enough in the afternoon that I'd stay behind any party floaters. Sure enough, it was 4:30 PM by the time I reached the bridge. Six miles to go and three hours or so in which to do it. At that point, I'd caught about 35 bass, all but two of them smallies, with one nice 16 incher and a few 12-14 inchers spaced among the average 10-11 inchers. Far from a great day of fishing--there have been trips when I'd caught twice that many fish on that stretch, and they averaged bigger. Topwater had not worked well at all, but now the shadows were hitting the water in most places, and I decided to simply fish a walk-the-dog lure the rest of the way, hitting the good pools carefully, otherwise just casting to nice pieces of cover here and there. One thing I'd noticed on the upper stretch was that some of the bigger fish were hanging out beneath logs and root balls right on the bank in pretty shallow water. So I thought I'd better look for spots like that and at least make a cast to ones that looked like possible fish-holding spots. I hadn't gone far below the bridge when I hit a nice little pool and started getting action. At first the fish were striking short, but they were nice fish. I switched to a somewhat smaller walk-the-dog topwater. Better. I started catching fish. Better fish than before. 13 to 15 inchers. Regularly. And sure enough, in a shallow run I made a cast that landed about five feet away from a small rootwad in less than 2 feet of water, and a big smallie came charging out from under the roots like it was shot out of a cannon, smashed the lure, and immediately leaped two feet out of the water. I love it when that happens. The fish went 18 inches. The sun was down by the time I got to really civilized water close to the take-out. People everywhere. But I continued to catch fish, right in front of them. It was getting dark by the time I slid the canoe onto the gravel bar next to my waiting vehicle. I'd caught 30 bass in that 2.5-3 hour period, all on topwater. I never get tired of that float!

Yep, nice walleye. All the larger Ozark streams hold some walleye, and some streams that aren't so big. They seem to get bigger in the south-flowing streams like the Current and Black, but I've caught them in the middle Bourbeuse, upper Big River, Meramec, Castor, Saline Creek, Establishment Creek (both of those flow directly into the Mississippi), the Eleven Point above Riverton, and the Little Black.

To get the most distance on your casts, in addition to what everybody else has said, you have to match your lure weight and aerodynamics to your rod power. With a medium heavy rod, it will be much more difficult to cast lures under a half ounce than it would be with a medium power rod, and you'll get more backlashes. The power of the rod is, in my experience, much more important to getting good, trouble free casts with particular weights of lures with casting tackle than it is with spinning, although it also makes a difference with spinning tackle. All that was alluded to in previous posts, but is worth stressing a bit...the rod that works well with 1/2 ounce jigs and flipping will not work well with 1/4 ounce buzzbaits. Having one baitcasting rod that you expect to do everything you want to do with baitcasting just doesn't work well. It's why most of us baitcasting fans have LOTS of rods and reels.

The problem is that the gauges extrapolate from river level in feet just what the flow in cfs is, and then they are periodically checked to see if the extrapolated flow actually matches the true flow. Changes in the stream bottom and banks at the gauge can throw off the extrapolations, and until some employee of the USGS comes along and measures, the computer just keeps giving the wrong flow. These changes in the river bottom don't make much difference when the river is higher, but once it gets down really low, they can really make for some false readings. I haven't been on the Bourbeuse lately, but I suspect its true flow right now is somewhere between 20 and 40 cfs. I "floated" a section of river Saturday that the gauge readings were saying was flowing less than 1 cfs. It wasn't flowing much, but it was probably flowing about 5 cfs in reality.

Yeah, there are walleye in the Gasconade, but not enough that catching one is LIKELY above Jerome. But certainly possible. I don't think anybody actually targets them on the middle Gasconade, but they are caught incidentally there.

Hank, you're probably not going to be able to do the St. Francis between Syenite and Silvermines in a Coleman. If it's high enough to get your barge through, it requires too much whitewater maneuverability for your barge. If it's low enough that your boat can handle the rapids, it becomes an almost impossible job to wrestle it through the shut-ins sections. Here's the deal. The shut-ins sections at low water flow less than 50 cfs. Often less than 20 cfs. That wouldn't even be enough water to be floatable on a normal Ozark stream unless you're willing to walk the riffles. But the St. Francis is far from normal. The shut-ins sections at that level have lots of spots where the gaps between the rocks are too narrow to even drag your boat through--you have to lift it over the rocks. And the wet, underwater rocks on the St. Francis are SLICK. I wouldn't want to tackle those sections in low water except in a small solo canoe or kayak with a minimum of gear. On the other hand, in higher water levels, say levels over 200 cfs on the Mill Creek USGS gauge, the river becomes a series of rapids and small waterfalls winding and twisting through the rocks. It takes a short boat with plenty of easy maneuverability to get through them, and hanging up on the rocks at those levels starts to become unforgiving, because the current can be strong enough to make getting the boat off the rocks difficult. Once you get true high water, over 500 cfs, the river starts to become dangerous, and takes plenty of whitewater experience to run, along with true whitewater craft. There may be a small window of river level, maybe between 100 and 200 cfs, when you could possibly get your boat down the river without totally working yourself to death. But I wouldn't try it in that boat. The Syenite to Roselle stretch is 10 miles and has two major shut-ins sections. Oz Hawksley's original book tells about the three mile stretch where the river drops 20 feet per mile, but what he didn't quite describe is that in normal water levels, that stretch consists of a half-mile section at the top where the river goes through a serious shut-in and drops maybe 15 feet, then a series of long pools with short, easy rapids that goes for about two miles, and then in the final half mile the river drops much of the rest of the whole 60 foot total. Those shut-ins at the top and bottom of that stretch are real bears. And just below, the river splits up and goes through a willow jungle for about a mile that some years is very difficult to find your way through. The Roselle to Silvermines stretch is even worse. It has three main shut-ins. The first one is the easiest, and I think you could probably get your boat down it in reasonable water. That, unfortunately, would lull you into a false sense of security. The Tieman Shut-in (Millstream Gardens) section is about a half-mile of REALLY rough water and rock mazes. If you make it through it, the Silvermines Shut-in section at the end is long and rough in places. You're right about there being no good public access below Silvermines. And although that section is somewhat doable in your boat, there are still a few short, rough rapids that would make it no picnic.

It would seem like such a thing would make a lot of sense and solve the problem, alright. Unfortunately, I think you can see the difficulty in getting it done. Everybody from local chambers of commerce to property rights groups would be involved, all pushing for their own interpretation of what streams are big enough to qualify for public use. And...I'm afraid that such a rule would end up giving us less access to wading size streams than we have now, because once you set up a criterion for which size of stream qualified, it would mean that EVERY stream that is smaller than the cut-off point would be for sure off-limits to the public. It's a can of worms no matter how you look at it.

Agreed, both methods work. But often one works when the other isn't working. So it's nice to be confident and proficient at both. To be honest, I'm probably far from the best angler at fishing the slow entice methods, but I do use them when I have to. The thing I've found for myself at least, is that I can almost always do okay with fishing fast in the summer, but often when I try fishing slow I don't do as well. Your results may vary. If you're wading, it's easy to switch from one method to the other, but if you're floating, you need about twice as much time to fish the same mileage of river with the slow method, so you almost have to decide beforehand which method you're going to use that day. Yep, I make my own. I'd be interested in seeing some of yours, so a trade might be in the offing. Warning, though...mine are not exactly works of art...they just work well for me.

A little more about why my methods work, and why they might NOT work for you... The fish I caught on Friday was in a spot that, chances are, the guy fishing soft plastics on the bottom wouldn't have bothered to fish. Thing is, when you fish slowly, you have a lot more time and effort devoted to each cast. So you tend to make your casts all to places you think will be holding fish. You thoroughly fish the good-looking water and ignore the rest, because if you tried to fish every possible spot, you'd feel you were wasting a lot of time in unproductive water. But the fish aren't always in the best piece of cover or the best looking spot in the pool. If they are active, they may be roaming around, cruising the banks, making forays into shallow water. That fish Friday was on a bank with nothing but a few straggly little limbs and a few small rocks right on the edge, nothing but gravel off the edge, the nearest water that was any deeper about 20 feet away, and it wasn't much deeper. But the fish was in the shade, probably lying in wait for schools of minnows to go cruising past. Minnows tend to avoid deeper water. Fish feed where the food is, and big fish like to have just a bit of security when they do so. The shade and the bank itself provided the security, the spot was a good one to lie in waiting for the minnows. But it sure didn't look like much, and I would NOT have predicted that fish to be there. If I was spending a minute or more on each cast, I'd have gone to the next place downstream that was deeper or had some real cover. But when you're only investing 15-20 seconds on each cast, you can make a lot of casts to spots that have just a SLIGHT possibility of holding a good fish. You can, in effect, put a lure in front of every fish in the stream. It's up to them to decide whether they hit it or not, but at least you're not skipping any of them, you're giving them all a chance. Fact is, I've probably caught as many big fish from spots that somewhat surprised me than I have from spots that I just KNEW had to have a big one. One more thing about this type of fishing. It's run and gun completely. You have to be able to cover lots of water. You very seldom make more than one cast to a spot, no matter how good it looks, unless you get a fish to hit there and think there might be more. You're fishing strictly for active fish, and if they don't hit on the first cast, they usually won't hit on the next one UNLESS you show them something completely different. As for the covering lots of water, if you're wading you have to be physically able to wade long distances up and down the creek. I'll wade and fish the smaller creeks at a rate of about a mile every two hours, which means if I'm spending much of the day at it I'll wade three or four miles of creek, and then have to wade or hike the same distance back to the car. Covering 6 to 8 miles a day on a creek with deep gravel, big rocks, heavy brush, slick bottoms, etc. requires being in shape to do so. If floating these small streams in a canoe, you are doing a lot of getting in and out of the canoe, dragging it over obstructions, and still being very careful to be as quiet as possible. It's not for everyone, but anyone can do at least some of it in combination with the usual slow and careful tactics. But...and this is important...as well as being in shape, you must have the tackle for it, and you must have the proficiency. Yesterday I took a guy from Virginia on one of my Bataan Death March "floats", 7 miles of stream where we had to drag the canoe over every riffle. First of all, he wasn't equipped with felt-soled shoes and wasn't used to getting in and out of a canoe all the time, so it was very difficult for him. Second, he had brought one spinning rod. Spinning is inherently not as good for these tactics as casting tackle...you CAN get proficient enough with spinning tackle to do everything, especially the never letting the lure sit still thing, but if you're not very much accustomed to fishing this way it will seem almost impossible with spinning tackle. I was getting non-stop action on topwater lures and my spinnerbait. He tried topwater but couldn't seem to master the quick tempo of fishing this way. He tried spinnerbaits but couldn't seem to get them moving as soon as they hit the water. The weight of the topwaters and spinnerbaits wasn't matched well to his tackle, so he wasn't accurate. His rod was too long and he couldn't fish in the close-in, brushy, overhanging spots. So he ended up going back to what he was used to fishing...soft plastics, slow. He ended up catching some nice fish with the soft plastics, but I think that under the circumstances he could have done better. I got a whole lot more action fishing from the back of the canoe than he did from the front, only fishing spots where I could make a long cast without messing up his fishing.

Thing is, it didn't used to be complicated. Back in the old days, there weren't that many people using streams, the smaller streams that are barely big enough for canoes weren't big enough for wooden johnboats and other boats like most people used back then, the majority of people using the streams didn't trash them, and landowners were usually tolerant of people using streams that flowed across their lands. There were few conflicts between landowners and stream users. But as floating and using the rivers got more popular, canoes and canoe rentals began to take the place of johnboats, and the litter problems started getting worse, a lot of landowners decided to try to limit the "damage". Elder vs. Delcour was actually a "friendly" case where two people got together and decided to bring suit against each other in order to get the courts to clarify. The MO Supreme Court ruled on it based upon whatever they could come up with that found precedents in public stream use in the past. Floating logs to market and other "traditional" uses were the easiest things to hit upon, rather than just coming flat out and saying that the public does or doesn't have the right to use waterways flowing across private land. It's like a lot of things when it comes to conflicting recreational uses...nobody ever has the foresight to see a problem coming before it becomes full-blown. Like jetboat/non-motorized river use...if somebody would have said, back in the early 1980s when jetboats first began to appear, "Hey, wait a minute...this is going to become a problem if these things get popular, so we better establish some guidelines right now," a lot of grief could have been avoided. Now, you've got powerful interests on all sides that will kick and scream if ANY limits or guidelines are instituted, and rightly so, because if you've invested in a $20,000 jetboat, you expect to be able to use it most anywhere you please, and if you have invested hundreds of thousands in a business selling jetboats, you've got even more of an incentive to fight any controls on them. It's not quite the same with stream access laws, but the fact is that a lot of people on both sides like the gray areas because if it was ruled in black and white, they might just end up on the wrong side of the ruling. A Supreme Court could just as easily rule that all streams everywhere that are not big enough for barge traffic are private, or at least, as it is in a couple of western states, you can float on the water but you cannot touch banks OR bottom of the river, because that's privately owned. And we river users would be in a world of hut. Or they could rule that the public has the right to use every little trickle of running water, and a lot of landowners would be just as hurt. So, a lot of people take the attutude of "be careful what you wish for". Wishing for a simple law that applies to everybody could result in a simple law that kept you off a lot more water than the present situation.

Okay, we've hashed this out before but here goes again...I guarantee you my "facts" are pretty straight. The NORS stuff has been publicized for a number of years, but I guarantee you that it has made NO difference whatsoever in how states decide which streams are usable by the public and which aren't. And it makes absolutely no difference whether the waterway is named "creek", "river", "fork", "prong", and any other possible name. You'd be hard-pressed to convince anyone that the upper end of any river in the state except Current River is "navigable". And you'd be hard-pressed to convince anyone in power that Huzzah Creek, Courtois Creek, Beaver Creek, and a number of others are NOT "navigable", given that there are canoe rentals of long standing on all of them. The "rulings" that NORS cites are simply NOT the rulings that are used in determining whether the public can use a stream. Each state DOES have its own set of rulings, and none of them go by the NORS stuff. While it may actually be a true ruling, in order to make it apply to any state or any stream, you're going to have to go to the U.S. Supreme Court and get it to declare it so. While it would certainly be nice if there WAS one ruling that everybody goes by, it ain't reality. You have states like Wyoming and Colorado that routinely rule that some streams and stream sections are private, and nobody can fish them or even get on them without permission from the landowners. You have Illinois, which just allowed one big landowner to close a long section of the Vermillion River, a floatable stream. You have Virginia, which has ruled that land grants originally granted by the King of England when the state was a colony are still in effect, and the people that hold them can close their section of floatable stream to everybody. On the other hand, you have a state like Montana that has ruled that if you can legally gain access to any fishing stream at public land (bridge crossings and public accesses) or by permission from ONE private landowner through his land, you can go ANYWHERE on that stream...UNLESS it's a spring creek. The REALITY is that Missouri and Arkansas go by their own legal precedents, and no prosecutor, sheriff, or court will pay the LEAST bit of attention to the NORS cited ruling. Period. Missouri goes by the Elder vs. Delcour ruling by the MO Supreme Court, which leaves a lot of gray areas on smaller streams. Arkansas goes by a ruling based upon a case on the Mulberry River a few decades ago. Both are pretty similar, and basically give the public the right to float and fish and camp within the high water banks of streams that are big enough to have been used for commercial purposes in the past, including floating logs to market. Where the MDC agent was right is that unless the stream is big enough (and well known enough) to be a "float stream", with a long tradition of floating and canoe renting, if a landowner decides to try to run you off it, you are at the mercy of the sheriff and county prosecutor. If they wish to prosecute you for it, you will have to fight it in court. Only if you then WIN will a precedent have been set, and the precedent will serve the purpose of "listing" the stream as usable by the public. Some counties and county officials are NOT friendly to landowners trying to run people off streams that have been used by the public in the past, and will, like the Franklin County officials in regard to Indian Creek, say that the stream IS legally usable by the public (even though several landowners continue to run people off it, and the county people are not too diligent about making them stop). However, money talks, and some county officials are quite willing to take the side of the rich landowner over the poor angler, maybe figuring that he'll have enough money to hire better lawyers. And as far as streams that are too small for floating and have never been floated, the county officials will almost always take the side of the landowner. The only reason there are still a lot of wadeable streams that are more or less open to the public is that the landowners don't care one way or another. Which means that if you frequent such a stream, you had BETTER be on your best behavior AND pick up after others who haven't been. And one other thing...Missouri and Arkansas real estate law is direct opposition to the NORS stuff. The landowner DOES own the stream bed on all but the commercially navigable rivers (mostly the Missouri and Mississippi...those rivers used by barge traffic). The only thing they don't own on all other streams is the water and the organisms that live in it. The Elder vs. Delcour ruling thus gave the public an "easement" to use private land, in effect.

Here's a little proof that my method works...caught yesterday afternoon on a stream that was VERY marginally floatable and clear, on my homemade spinnerbait. It was right up against the bank in no more than 18 inches of water, and charged my lure when I landed it two feet away and reeled it about a foot. For comparison purposes, my paddle blade is 20.2 inches from the tip to where the flare of the paddle out of the shaft starts. This fish was exactly 20 inches. I had another that was about 17.5, and caught 51 bass altogether.

Creekwader is experimenting with spinnerbaits, crankbaits, and topwaters, trying to develop a liking for something besides soft plastics, on the small waters he fishes, and so far has had mediocre results. Others have stated that they think soft plastics rule in shallow creeks in the summer. I pretty much disagree, so I thought I'd write a bit about the way I fish such waters. No matter whether you're talking about streams big enough to be floatable by canoe, or tiny creeks with riffles you can step across in three strides without getting your ankles wet, I pretty much fish them all the same way with the same stuff, and of that stuff, I almost never use soft plastics and jigs if the water is really clear. I grew up fishing some fairly murky waters for smallies, and learned early to use bigger lures. When I'd stray from my home waters to fish some of the air-clear streams of the Ozarks, I let such waters intimidate me. I thought I HAD to use small, "natural" looking, soft plastic lures to fool the fish in those creeks. But that approach never worked all that well for me, so finally I gave it all some serious thought, and decided to go in a different direction. Instead of going small and natural, I'd go a little bigger and try for pure reaction strikes. THAT worked. I think it works because smallmouth and other bass are naturally aggressive, and as long as they feel secure (meaning they don't know you're there or you're not close enough to bother them) they'll act like bass. They'll react to things going by them that look alive by putting them in their mouths! Here's the thing, though. In clear water, they can see extremely well. If something is moving slowly or sitting still, they are probably going to look it over before trying it. In clear water, that sometimes gives them too many negative cues. They see the line (no matter how thin it is...you can't tell me they can see 10 pound mono and not 4 pound mono). They see the profile, and it doesn't look quite like what they are used to eating. They see the color and it doesn't look quite right, either. Face it, very few lures we use look EXACTLY like the creatures they are supposed to be imitating. Sometimes, bass being bass, it doesn't matter. Sometimes, though, it does. But if something lands 10 feet away (trust me, they KNOW when something lands 10-15 feet away, sometimes before it even hits the water), and moves swiftly across the surface or moves quickly and erratically with lots of splash and commotion, they just can't examine it closely. They don't have time to notice the negatives. The splash or speed obscures it. It's moving, though, so it must be alive, and it's small enough to swallow. THAT triggers the predatory response. Often, not always. Nothing is ever absolute in fishing. "The dog days of summer." That is something else that intimidates fishermen more than it bothers fish. They gotta eat. In fact, with higher water temps, they have to eat MORE to feed their increased metabolism. The bigger fish may feed a lot at night, but they also feed sometime during the day. And even more importantly, the low water concentrates them. Living in close proximity, they have to compete with each other for food. This works very much in the angler's favor, especially with reaction style baits. It's a race to the "food". So...here's how I approach it. First, be quiet. Don't wade noisily. Second, make long casts. They don't have to be accurate. In fact, you don't want to land lures right on the fish's head, so make your casts land a few feet away from where you think the fish will be. To do this, you have to have tackle that will make long, effortless casts with the lures you're using. I use light baitcasting tackle almost exclusively. My creek wading rod is a 5.2 ft. medium light casting rod with a light reel (I'm currently using BPS's Prolite Finesse reel), and 8 pound test co-poly line. With it, I can make long, easy casts and start retrieving the instant the lure hits the water. That's important. I don't want the lure sitting in one place. My lures? 1. Walk the dog topwaters--3.5 to 4.5 inch long bodies. Sammy 85 and 100. Dog-X. 2. Popper types--Lucky Craft G-Splash is my current favorite. 3. smallish buzzbaits--1/4 ounce and fairly compact. 4. My homemade Subwalk, a 3.5 to 4 inch walk the dog sinking lure. 5. My homemade twin spin, bucktail spinnerbait much like the old Shannon Twin Spin, with a 3/4 inch curly tail grub trailer. 6. Soft plastic jerkbaits, like Zoom Superflukes, the only fast-moving soft plastic I like. And that's about it. To fish the walk-the-dog and popper type topwaters, I start the retrieve the instant the lure hits the water. I twitch it at a cadence of about two twitches per second. No pauses, keep it moving. I make the poppers walk-the-dog as well, and spit...you DON'T want them to go BLOOMP, just spit water and zig zag. The regular walkers should do it splashily, so I give them pretty hard twitches on slackish line. If a fish hits, pause to make sure it has the lure...either you feel it or the lure is gone. You'll get lots of missed strikes, so if the fish misses, keep it moving. They'll usually hit it again. My Subwalk works the same way, same cadence, same starting it as soon as it hits the water. Strikes on it are often very soft. The buzzbait is, of course, simple, just cast it out and reel it in, fast enough to make plenty of bubbles. The twin spin also needs to start moving the very instant it hits the water, and reel it fast enough that it bulges the surface on the retrieve. I give it a twitch about every three feet or so while continuing to reel, just something to break the whir of the blades. This often triggers following fish. The fluke-type baits are rigged weightless, and like the other lures, you start them moving when they hit the water and you keep them moving. I think color is important in this kind of fishing, and it should further your aims of not giving the fish a good look. In surface lures, I'll go with light, minnow-imitating colors, often translucent. In the buzzbait and spinnerbait...chartreuse! Why chartreuse, a "highly visible" color? Because from the fish's vantage point, it is NOT highly visible. The fish are looking UP at it. They are seeing it against a bright sky, sunlight filtering through leaves (yellow green). Against that background chartreuse blends in very well. It's only on rare occasions that this approach doesn't work. I carry a box of tubes for those rare occasions, but they rarely get used unless I decide to try them on the way back to the car. Color of tube? Look at the bottom of the creek, and pick out a tube color that matches it as closely as possible. After all, that's what the color is of most of the bottom organisms the bass feed upon. That's about it. It's actually pretty simple. Keep yourself moving, keep the lures moving up close to the surface, and cherry pick the active fish. This time of year on smaller waters, there are usually plenty of active fish, unless the creek is being pounded by a lot of other people.

I'm going to write up a little piece about fishing with fast moving lures on small, clear waters in the summer, and put it in the general fishing section. Maybe it might give you some ideas.

Same tactics for the stretch above Allenton. As TroutRinger pointed out, it will be murky there as well. More smallmouth in that stretch, still a lot of spotted bass. More water with good current.

Mileages to Valley Park... Times Beach Access at I-44--11.5 Castlewood State Park--3.5 As a general rule, figure on floating one mile per hour if you're mainly fishing with faster moving lures like crankbaits, spinnerbaits, etc. Cut that down to about a half mile an hour if you really like to fish with slower stuff like jigs and soft plastics. Like Goggleye said, most of the structure you'll be fishing will be scattered along the banks on both sides of the river, so you'll need to switch often from bank to bank. And forget about using the small stuff on the lower Meramec. It's always murky and you often need to use decent size lures to get the attention of the better fish. Basically, you could use about anything you use on Table Rock and have a good chance of catching fish. As I said in the other thread, once you get below Times Beach Access, you're getting into the part of the river that gets backup from the Mississippi in high water, and the smallmouths get pretty scarce and spotted bass take over, with the occasional big largemouth. The spotted bass act pretty much like smallies, however. Concentrate your efforts where the water is moving well, don't spend a lot of time in dead slack water.

Wader, like I said in the Senko thread, if you are fishing small, very clear wading creeks, you may NOT do well with normal crankbaits and spinnerbaits. I fish such lures only in bigger or murkier waters. Crankbaits often don't work well if the water clarity is more than about 4 feet. Normal spinnerbaits often don't work well in little creeks. My twin spin is an exception to this "rule", but even with it I don't always feel confident in really small waters. Topwater lures, on the other hand, are a great choice in small, clear waters. You gotta give them a real chance.

I'm guessing, from looking at the picture and from having weighed quite a few big smallmouth in the past, that fish probably weighed right in the neighborhood of 4 pounds, maybe a few ounces more. Your friend is a lucky man. There probably aren't more than a handful of Ozark river smallies over 6 pounds caught in a decade. The chances of a river fish actually beating the state record are probably nil. I think I've said it before here...weight is unimportant to me. Weight depends upon how healthy the fish is, what time of year it is, or even if it's been eating better than usual lately. The same 20 incher that, full of eggs, weighs 4.5 pounds in March might only weigh 3.5 in July. Is it a "better" catch in March? It's the same fish. To me, all 20 inchers are the same "value". I've caught two river smallies that reached or slightly beat the 22 inch mark in my lifetime, neither of which would have weighed more than 5 pounds. But I consider them just as memorable as I would consider your buddy's 6.4 pounder had I caught it. A fish of that length is truly a catch of a lifetime, no matter what the weight.

That part of the Meramec still has the character of an Ozark stream, with some long, still pools but some nice riffles and moving water. It holds all three species of bass, with spotted bass probably more common than smallmouth and largemouth. You can also catch lots of catfish and the occasional walleye. It's actually a pretty easy stretch of river to use a kayak to paddle upstream and float back down because it's mostly pretty slow and the riffles are fairly deep. Although it's pretty civilized water with lots of cabins, there are still some pretty places along it that make you think you're deep in the Ozarks. Once you get much below Route 66, you get into the part of the river where back-up from the Mississippi more frequently occurs when the Mississippi floods. This seems to change the character of the Meramec...more silty banks and backwaters, fewer gravelly and rocky riffles. Big River also enters a little ways above Route 66, and the Meramec below Big River is wider and slower. But the whole stretch from the mouth of the Bourbeuse to Route 66 is a surprisingly nice piece of river.

Great fish. I think the 20 inch mark on river smallmouth is a great goal, because it IS attainable, but it doesn't come easy and it doesn't happen often.

Yeah, Joe, Pop-R type (actually a Lucky Craft G-Splash--of all the popper types I've tried, this one is the easiest to get to walk the dog and spit). I've never been a fan of the jerkbaits in the summer for some reason, and the problem with suspending jerkbaits on this creek is that the more you twitch them the deeper they go, and when you're fishing in two feet of water, three twitches and the thing is dragging the bottom. Nice thing about this lure is that the more you twitch it the shallower it goes, so you can twitch it pretty fast and keep it a foot or so under the surface, or move it slower and let it sink. It does fill a niche that no other hard bait does. You can get some of the same effects with a soft jerkbait like a Superfluke, but it's more difficult to keep the fluke type baits zig-zagging without diving or popping to the surface when you work them aggressively. However, the fish hit it much like a jerkbait, often fairly gently and with precision.

When I got back from my abbreviated trip to the creek the other day and told my wife about it, she said, "Well, I guess you'll be going back there soon." Yep, today. I wanted to start out at the same spot, and see if hot, stable weather instead of approaching thunderstorms would make a big difference in the fishing. So I began by tying on my homemade twin spin to see if it would get anything in the water I'd already fished the other day. Nope, nothing but one half-hearted strike in the first two pools. So I went back to a topwater lure, but this time a popper. It worked somewhat better in the "used" water. By the time I'd covered the half mile or so where I'd caught 30 fish in an hour the other day, I had caught 9 fish today. And they didn't average nearly as big. But I figured that was to be expected; after all, in this small water I'd probably caught a good percentage of the fish the last time. So once I got into "new" water, I figured I'd start catching more fish. I did, but it still wasn't as fast action as before. And I was getting some investigations and refusals from the bigger fish. Maybe it was the popper. I put on the walk-the-dog topwater I'd used the other day. It wasn't the right choice...half-hearted strikes that mostly didn't result in hook-ups. So, since I didn't feel like fishing something slower, and that pretty much exhausted my lure supply for the day (I don't carry many lures on wading trips to these little creeks), I just figured I stick with the popper, since it was working fairly well. I ended up wading about three miles of water. Lots of it was really marginal habitat, but I saw some good fish and caught a couple of 15-16 inchers. Saw a few big largemouths. Had a couple of smallies strike and not stay hooked that looked to be around 17 inches. One decent pool had a bunch of nice fish, and I caught a couple. The next pool was even better looking, but it was right at an access on a county gravel road, and apparently somebody had been pounding those fish. Finally, after hiking up through a water willow jungle where the creek split into two weed-choked channels, and emerging to a long straight stretch with no good water in sight, the sun sinking low, I decided it was time to start the long hike back to the car. I hiked much of it without fishing, before deciding, on a whim, to try the one lure I had carried along but not given a shot before now. It was my homemade "Subwalk", a wooden stick bait that I'd weighted to sink slowly. It's designed to be an underwater walk-the-dog lure. When I'd started back downstream, my running total of bass for the day was 26 smallmouth and 9 largemouth. I first tried the new lure in the pool where I'd seen a couple of nice fish that missed the popper going upstream. First cast, and I caught one of them, a smallie of about 17 inches. Second cast, I caught the other, a 16 incher! Next cast, a 10 incher. Geez, the fish were nuts about this lure! The next pool was the farthest upstream of my original "used" water, the water I'd fished the other day. In the 40 minutes or so it took me to get back to the car from there, my running total of fish climbed to 39 smallmouth and 12 largemouth. Which just goes to show you that it's always possible that you're not using quite the right lure!

Actually I'm not surprised at your experience with crankbaits and spinnerbaits if you are mostly fishing small, wading type streams. On the little creeks that I wade and fish, I seldom throw crankbaits and "normal" spinnerbaits, either. In my experience, crankbaits work best whent there is some color to the water. I seldom throw them if you can see the bottom in water deeper than 4 feet. And with spinnerbaits, they seem to work best in bigger waters, clear or murky. On the other hand, my homemade twin spin WILL work in small, clear waters. The one thing you're probably REALLY missing out on in small, clear creeks by sticking with soft plastics is the topwater bite. Geez, I use topwater lures 75% of the time in the wading creeks I fish. See my latest report in the "other Ozark streams" section...as soon as I write it up about today's trip.