One More Wading Adventure Before Vacation

[Al Agnew]

Smalliebigs, I wasn't worried about you fishing that creek and certainly wasn't implying that you were one of the pinheads. I just don't like the idea of calling that much attention to one specific creek. Any well-used access on any of those creeks will show the same evidence of pinhead abuse, but those kind of pinheads are too lazy to go far from the access, and when they don't catch much at the access they go somewhere else the next time. But if they get wind that the creek is supposed to be good fishing, they might get up enough energy to go exploring.

I was just referring back to your other posts on the other wading creeks as well. I know very well all the Big River tributaries, as well as the creeks running into the Mississippi, although in a report I did a few months ago I mentioned that I'd never floated one of those tribs until then.

And actually, none of them are a real secret. In Chuck Tryon's book, he gives the accesses to them all.

[Quillback]

Nice fish, nice pics.

[Guest P. owensby]

What is a P.M . ?

[snagged in outlet 3]

It's a private message through the forum. It's the envelope icon below your name.

SIO3

[timinmo]

I think we need to go to a secret handshake and maybe some of those special glasses that let you see hidden messages.

Seriously I wince whenever someone talks about some of the small creeks. I think even heavy pressure from a bunch of CR anglers will have an negative effect. It is great that so many of us like to fish the creeks but they are a much more fragile environment and I know we all "handle with care".

I would like to bring up another issue with many of them. My experience is that many of the holes in the small creeks and the head waters of some of the smaller rivers seem to be filling in with gravel. Is anyone else seeing this or are my memories just colored by too much time?

Tim

[Al Agnew]

It's an interesting question. Small creeks are very sensitive to land use changes and alteration of the channel. Clear a few acres here and there, resulting in more erosion, and more gravel ends up in the creeks. It's hard to realize how much gravel gets into a creek from just one hollow in one big flood if somebody has been messing around clearing timber in that hollow. You usually don't realize it because the flooded creek spreads the new gravel out. But I learned a real lesson one time when there was a big rain over a very small area on Big River. The river upstream from that area never got any kind of rise, so toward the upper end of the stretch that got the big rain, the river itself wasn't high enough to spread out the tremendous amounts of gravel and even boulders that were coming out of some of the hollows and tiny creeks. It just piled up at their mouths in huge deposits.

Even worse that poor land use practices in the watersheds is messing around with the creek and its banks. The stupid farmer that clears the trees right up to water's edge in order to get a little more pasture...next flood the creek starts eating away his bank, in effect widening its channel. The wider the channel is, the shallower it's likely to be. The pinhead that decides the creek needs to be straightened to "take the high water on downstream faster". A straight creek is a shallow, filled in creek. And the person or company that digs gravel out of the creek...some people think that getting the gravel out is the solution to the problem, but unless you dig out miles and miles of creek, which pretty much totally wrecks the creek anyway, all you're doing is de-stabilizing gravel upstream and even downstream of where you dig. In an undisturbed creek, the gravel bars are usually partially overgrown with weeds and willows and young sycamores, and the top layer of gravel is usually somewhat cemented together in a kind of crust in many places. So the gravel bars pretty much stay stable during moderately high water events, and the gravel doesn't move. Even in real high water events, those toad-strangling rip-roaring floods, a lot of the gravel bars remain stable, but the channel that's normally underwater gets scoured out and more gravel is thrown out of it onto the highest gravel bars and even up in the bottom fields. So really big floods on healthy creeks often tend to deepen the pools and scour holes around rootwads and rocks. But on creeks where those gravel bars have been dug up or just moved around, the gravel is now unstable and loose, and any flood that's high enough to put current over those bars simply moves gravel off them and into the next deep pool.

Some of the creeks we've been talking about have actually been extensively mined for gravel in the past, and are just now beginning to recover fully. Leave the creek alone long enough, and the gravel bars stabilize, the trees grow up on and around them, the channel starts to get more winding as it works around the stabilized bars, and pretty soon you start getting decent pools. But it takes a long time and if the creek has been extensively straightened, it may never get back to what it once was. A couple of the Mississippi tributaries have long stretches that have been straightened many, many years ago, and they are still straight and still mostly shallow.