Shallow lake

[shawncat]

I have fished Wap a few times with good success.Channel bends around Chanoia Landing and Lost creek are good.Uplake it is somewhat a river due the St. Francois emptying into it.I like to fish the oxbows in that area some contain springs.The lake is very shallow in areas.I think it avg.4ft.I have hit bottom in the middle of the lake in sight of the dam.Blue/white ,red/white tube jigs for crappie.Blue worms for bass.In my opinion it is one of the best early crappie lakes around.[Feb.& March]

[ryan]

glad to see someone added this lake this is my home town lake, all my family lives in poplar bluff and I still visit from school quite a bit. I have had many 100+ crappie days on the lake. Numbers are there but size may be harder to come by, they implemented a size limit which is a good thing. Yes it is a very shallow lake try running at winter pool. I have seen many a lower unit taken off.

[slabseeker]

I too am glad to see Wappapello added (thanks Phil) I really enjoy reading posts about all the fishing waters, but it nice to have your home lake there too. I fish Wappapello many times during the year. Crappie fishing during the winter months, bluegill, catfish and crappie in spring. I go when I can during summer, but those months mostly taken up with coaching my girls softball teams and one week over at Lilley's trout fishing. Still have been catching some real nice cats on jugs real early in the morning last couple weekends. Am real familiar with good ole Poplar Bluff. Went to college there

(GO RAIDERS!) and have family there. Still go over few times every year to watch TRCC basketball.

[crappiefisherman]

I am interested in this lake. exactly where is it?im from Branson and would like to get out of here and try a new lake.Is there day use fes, how big a motor can you have on the lake?

[Dutch]

I have only been there once. The skeeters were bigger than my dog.

[Al Agnew]

I grew up fishing Wappapello (by the way, though, it's Reelfoot that was formed by the earthquakes, Wappapello was formed by a big dam). Wappapello is a flood control impoundment on the St. Francis River in Southeast MO, north of Poplar Bluff. It was built back in the 1950s so it is an old lake. It is not a deep lake anyway, and siltation has made it shallower than it once was. When I was a kid and my dad and I fished it back in the early 1960s, normal pool was at about elevation 357 ft. above sea level. By the late 60s, the Corps had raised normal level to 359, and now I think it's around 360. This was probably the result of less capacity due to siltation. The lake used to have huge stump fields, as the trees were cut rather than bulldozed before impoundment, and a lot of swampy islands in the middle and lower sections. There was a well-defined river channel, and the key to catching huge stringers of big bass, as we did back then, was to find and fish the stump fields along the old river channel. Usually the stumps were from 5-10 feet deep, but the lake was always murky so you couldn't see them, and this was before depth finders came into use, so few people knew where they all were. The islands and their margins were bass magnets in the spring, the stumps were heavy producers in the summer, and bass fishing on Wappapello was almost magical back in the 60s.

At about the time that bass boats and bass tourneys bacame popular, the fishing on Wappapello started to go seriously downhill. There was a lot of aquatic vegetation in the lower half of the lake, but it disappeared in the early 1970s and further depressed the bass fishing. The stumps gradually disappeared, rotting away, washed away, or covered in silt, and the lake became pretty barren as far as cover was concerned.

The crappie fishing on Wappapello also keyed around the stump fields. Everybody fished brushy banks and caught small to medium crappie, but the big ones were always on those stumps. We didn't fish for them, but regularly caught 2-3 pound crappie on bass lures.

Dad still fishes Wappapello, but he's fishing more for the memories. The fishing is a mere shadow of what it once was. There are lots of tournaments, but big bags of fish are exceedingly uncommon at the weigh-ins. The 5-8 pound fish we once caught are practically non-existent. The islands, which were also once a mecca of bird life, are also gone, flooded by the higher water levels and washed away. It's still an interesting lake, and you CAN find reasonably good fishing in it, but I can't stand to go there anymore because I remember what it was once like, and there is no comparison with what it is now.

[Phil Lilley]

by the way, though, it's Reelfoot that was formed by the earthquakes, Wappapello was formed by a big dam

I knew if I was wrong someone would correct me. I couldn't google the info anyplace so I suspected I was wrong. Thanks for letting me know. And thanks for sharing your experiences.