Good Access

[Ozarkroots]

I live in Lebanon but have never fished the Big Piney....does anybody know a good place to put in that would have enough water to run my jet boat? I don;t want to drive all that way and end up in a place thats log jammed or something. Also, I'm a big smallie angler and wanted to know if there were parts of the river that seemed to porduce more fish than others.

[Al Agnew]

Current flow of the Big Piney at Fort Leonard Wood is well under 200 cfs. You might be able to run it at that level, but I wouldn't. While the Big Piney gets some jet boat use at higher water levels, it isn't quite big enough to lend itself to easy jet boat running. The river, of course, has the most water at the lower end, below the fort, but there are a lot of riffles on it where the river splits with about equal amounts of water going down both sides, and some of those places are not even deep enough to take a canoe down at this level without considerable dragging. And the lowest access with a boat ramp is the Ross Bridge access, which is farther upstream and flows a little less volume.

[Ozarkroots]

Current flow of the Big Piney at Fort Leonard Wood is well under 200 cfs. You might be able to run it at that level, but I wouldn't. While the Big Piney gets some jet boat use at higher water levels, it isn't quite big enough to lend itself to easy jet boat running. The river, of course, has the most water at the lower end, below the fort, but there are a lot of riffles on it where the river splits with about equal amounts of water going down both sides, and some of those places are not even deep enough to take a canoe down at this level without considerable dragging. And the lowest access with a boat ramp is the Ross Bridge access, which is farther upstream and flows a little less volume.

Thanks so much Al...I run my jet on the Niangua alot and it sounds like it may be similar...probably should stay off until this rain gets it up a little! You wouldn't happen to be the Al Agnew who has his name all over these beautiful paintings in my office would you?

[Al Agnew]

Yep, that's me.

The Piney is actually a little smaller than the Niangua below Bennett. The Niangua is flowing around 400 cfs (and just starting to rise a bit from this rain) and the "normal" flow on it at this time of year is roughly 350-400 cfs. The Piney is flowing less than half that. And on the stream I'm most familiar with for jetboat running, the Meramec above Onondaga (actually above the mouth of the Huzzah), I won't run it if it's flowing much under 500 cfs.