Those stretches you fished were dynamite 30 years ago. Now they have a few dinosaurs left for smallmouth but they are few and far between. Lots of rough fish and a few walleye that came up from the Mississippi. The water quality there is so bad that they don’t recommend eating any fish from there more than once every 6 months.
Back then, the confluence of the Meramec and Big was the big fish hot spot…I mean if you wanted to catch a 5 pound smallmouth, that was the spot. Back in the day the MDC used to show up to the MSA meetings and show the results of the shocking survey. It seemed the Big River would always have the biggest fish. I always kind of questioned their shocking techniques and how they came up with those numbers on their surveys. Maybe because the Big River was smaller water than the Meramec, the shocker device was more efficient. Don’t get me wrong, the Big still has huge fish but so does the Meramec. It’s so hard to choose the best stretches of rivers anymore…between flooding, loss of fertile water, and the Asian carp invasion I don’t see anything improving unfortunately.