Smallmouth Fishing On Meramec By Steelville This Sunday

[Gavin]

Glad you are catchin some nice fish down there and look forward to your reports. Uploading photo's is pretty easy on this site..Hit the more reply options button in the reply to topic window and add them as attachments. You may have to resize them.

[Blazerman]

Your right. That was easy. Here is a pic of one of the spinnerbait fish from a couple of weeks ago.

And the second is my 4lb 20" dandy from last summer.

[Greasy B]

Great fish!

What part of the river is your favorite?

[Blazerman]

Since I am running around with my Blazer, I tend to stay on the lower half where I don't aggravate as many floaters. I mainly run from the 30 bridge up to Plum Ford. But I have run from my place by the K bridge up past the Caverns before. It is a great stretch of river because there is not much access between Red Horse and Sand Ford. Keeps the crowds down.

Plus when I fish, I usually don’t target smallmouth specifically. I always let the smallmouth go but still like to catch fish to eat. So I use baits that will catch many different fish.

I caught all these fish out of one deep hole by a bluff on a fluke type minnow. I tore off about a quarter of the bait so that it ended up about 4” long and rigged it on a lead jig head with the hook exposed. I think it was a quarter oz. Let it fall slowly into the hole and gave it a few jerks as it fell. If I am not mistaken these are sauger not walleyes. Also caught some nice smallmouth at this same spot but they are not in the basket because I don’t Keep them.

[Blazerman]

Here was the picture I was trying to share.

[drew03cmc]

That little sauger looks like it may be sublegal.

[Mitch f]

That little sauger looks like it may be sublegal.

Well git out your bullet out of yer pocket and arrest him Mr. Fife!

[Al Agnew]

I am 54 soon to be 55 and have been fishing Ozark streams as long as I can remember. Started out as a kid with a rental just below Meramec Caverns at a place called Twin Springs. Back then there were no jet drives so we all had john boats with prop motors. We managed to get around pretty good though and caught a lot of smallmouth. Plus largemouth and nice walleye too. Didn’t see near as many Spotted bass back then. Seems like the water was deeper then with less gravel too.

Once we gave up the rental place in my early teens I started floating in canoes and floated all over Missouri. Use to cuss the jet boaters too, once they started showing up. I have owned quite a few canoes and used to float and camp quite a bit.

Now I have a real nice place by the K bridge on the Meramec. Had 5 canoes there for a while and used to do floats for family and friends. But I finely got tired of shuttling the canoes so a few years ago I bought my first jet boat. Don’t know why I waited so long because now I will never be without one. Right now I have a Blazer boat with a 40 jet.

With all that said, I think I have a great perspective. And I can tell you Smalliebigs is right on. The smallmouth fishing is as good as it ever has been on the Meramec. And it really isn’t that hard to catch an 18” fish. I based this on the fact that most times when I go, I catch plenty of fish. Many times there are more spotted bass then smallmouth and that is mostly what I fish for. I like to eat fish and I always keep and eat the spotted bass and always let the smallmouth go.

But if I decide to fish for smallies I usually have no trouble catching plenty. The thing I always notice is I will normally catch everything from 8”-10” fish to fish a lot larger. To me that means there is always a good smallmouth spawn. If I wasn’t catching small fish I would be worried.

But so far, that has never happened.

For the record my largest smallmouth last summer was a tad over 4lbs and right at 20”. And I have caught 20” fish each summer for the last three years.

If some one can explain to me how to put pictures on here I will include some.

Blazerman, all I know is that I've been fishing the Meramec since the mid-1970s, and I know what I saw. I watched my catch rate of small fish drop sharply at the time that jetboats first got popular, from an average of something close to 50 fish a day to less than 20 a day. It has since improved in some sections, including the part of the river where you usually fish, although spotted bass have, as you say, become much more common and smallies less common. I'd say that now, in the relatively rare times I fish your sections in warm weather, I will maybe average 25 fish a day, and as you say, they will be all sizes. I believe the section of the river that has declined the most is from Onondaga to Meramec State Park. I've had a few decent trips in that section in recent years, but a lot of less than decent trips even in the winter.

Your note about catching four nice smallies in one small area seems to be typical of the river these days, even in the summer. Back when I fished it pre-jetboat days, you'd just float along in a canoe and catch fish just about everywhere. Now, you seem to go for long distances of decent habitat catching very little, and then find a nice spot and catch several fish. The smallies also spawned on just about every usable bank, where now there seem to be distinct spawning areas and long distances where little or no spawning is taking place. What I think happened is that there was that period when jetboats first got popular when it really screwed up their spawning, but since then the smallies have adapted, and usually get off decent spawns. But for whatever reason...fishing pressure or the change in spawning habits, the river just doesn't seem to have the numbers of fish it once did, or they are tougher to catch (and I doubt that, because even the little ones don't come as often or as easily as they once did).

Don't get me wrong, it's still a great river, and I believe that what is still hurting your section the most is the competition with spotted bass. But I don't believe it's as good, or at least as easy fishing, as it was back in the 1970s and early 1980s. Perhaps you know a lot of the sweet spots since you fish it a lot, but now you HAVE to know those scattered good spots; you can't just catch fish everywhere like I once could.