Report Of My Springfield Area Weekend...

[Al Agnew]

First of all, thanks to everybody who showed up for my talk on Thursday night. To tell the truth, I had a lot more stuff I wanted to talk about, but ran out of time. Maybe next year Phil will have me again to talk about the rest of it!

Mary has friends in the Springfield area that get together regularly, and this weekend was one of those times, so it worked out well that I had the talk on Thursday; we stayed in the area from Thursday until Sunday.

Mary was meeting with some of her friends on Friday, but volunteered to put me in and take me out for a float trip. I chose to float the James from Hwy. 160 to Delaware Town Access, a stretch I'd never before floated. The river was definitely high, and was pretty murky at the put-in, though it cleared some farther downstream. I had two bass follow my spinnerbait on the first cast, so I thought it was a good omen. However, the fishing was very hit and miss, with a lot more misses than hits. The water temps were in the low 60s, and I would have thought the bass would be pretty active, but I fished a lot of good looking water with little to show for it. All in all I caught 14 spotted bass, two largemouth, and one lonely smallie. Some of the spots were very nice fish, however...including a very fat 17 incher that hammered my homemade crankbait just below the rapid at the fancy golf course. The smallmouth was about 14 inches.

Mary asked me if the river was pretty. I said it was, but it was also a float to gaze at trophy houses. Geez, there were an awful lot of big, fancy homes atop the bluffs!

A couple more notable things...this stretch of stream has about the biggest sunfish I've ever encountered on an Ozark stream. Huge green sunfish and hybrid sunfish (probably green X bluegill, or maybe green X redear. I wish I'd have been keeping them. I caught a bunch on crankbaits.

And...copperheads do occasionally take a swim. I was drifting, canoe sideways to the current, down a pool when I glanced upstream and saw a snake swimming toward me, about 30 feet away. It was swimming with its entire body on the surface, which is a pretty good way to tell cottonmouths from ordinary water snakes, but I could tell it wasn't a cottonmouth. Nope, it was a copperhead, a big one about 30 inches long, coming straight toward the canoe. I picked up the paddle in case I had to fend it off, but it stopped and stared at me from five feet away, and then continued swimming, right under the front end of the canoe and on downstream to some floating debris, where it crawled out into the sun. I took some pictures of it with my cell phone...have to figure out how to get them downloaded.

A lot of people would have freaked at seeing a poisonous snake swimming toward their canoe, certain that it was intent on climbing into the canoe and attacking them. But I was pretty certain that the snake was just swimming to get out of the water somewhere, and I happened to be in the way. Still, it was an interesting encounter. It's only the third or fourth time I've seen a copperhead on the water.

Saturday, Mary was staying with her friends, and I decided to go exploring, heading toward Flat Creek. I first stopped at the old iron bridge at Jenkins, with the plan of possibly paddling upstream a ways and fishing back down, or possibly finding somebody at the bridge to shuttle me for a float. There was a single pickup truck there with two people inside...couldn't tell what they were doing. I was a little reluctant to approach them. Then I saw two guys in kayaks coming under the bridge and heading downstream. I talked to them for a bit and they considered letting me float with them and they'd haul me back to my vehicle, but decided they couldn't haul my canoe and both kayaks on their truck. Then two trucks with canoes pulled up. Aha, I thought, these guys might be willing to shuttle me as they shuttled themselves. It's always been my experience that most floaters are very willing to help other floaters like that.

But as soon as they piled out of their trucks, the one woman was cussing her significant other non-stop about anything she could think of. He was understandably in a bad mood. Looked like he'd just as soon shoot me as look at me, and he looked like the kind of guy who'd do it. So much for that idea. So I decided to go down the gravel bar and check on the guys in the first pick-up...but they were just leaving. They were a couple of teenage boys that I bet would have jumped at the chance to shuttle me for a few dollars, but I was too late.

So I put the canoe in and paddled upstream. Flat Creek is fast. I dragged a lot more than I paddled, going about two miles up the creek, coming to one big, deep pool. I figured there would be smallies in the faster water, but that pool would be sure to hold some nice ones.

Nope. I never got a strike in the pool. Caught two smallies on my spinnerbait drifting back down in faster water.

By this time it was mid-afternoon, but I decided to head over to Crane Creek and try some flyfishing for those McClouds.

Crane Creek at the Wire Road CA is not the easiest stream to fish, I found out. I wonder why that stretch has such high banks. However, I did manage to catch a few trout in a couple hours of fishing, including a couple of 11-12 inchers. It was a nice way to end the day.

We left for home Sunday morning.