Wappapello Lake--Google Earth

[Al Agnew]

Once in a while I get on Google Earth and do some armchair exploring. It's an amazing resource for getting a feel for unfamiliar rivers. Most of the imagery now is so good you can see individual logs in the river and see all the riffles and deep pools (as long as the photos were taken when the river was normal to low and clear, and if they were taken in high, muddy water, you can go back in the history feature and look at earlier aerial photos that may have been taken in better conditions).

Last night, I happened to check out Wappapello Reservoir. When I was a kid, my dad took me to Wappapello just about every weekend. Back then in the 1960s there were very few good bass anglers on that lake, and it was a terrific fishery. If you're not familiar with Wappapello, it is a shallow reservoir on the St. Francis River, with the dam right at the point where the river leaves the Ozark hills and enters the Mississippi Embayment (or as we Missourians call it, the Bootheel, or Swampeast Missouri). Much of the lake, even in the lower end, is less than ten feet deep at normal pool, and back then, normal pool was a little lower than it is now. The old river channel winds through what were once wide bottomlands between the hills, and when it was constructed the trees were cut but the stumps were left, and remained as big stump fields along the old river banks and islands. You had to know the channel, and back then it wasn't marked; the red and green buoys marking the sides of the channel were installed around 1970. Dad and a couple of his buddies were some of the few people who knew the lake well enough to run it from Greenville Bridge to the dam at full throttle, though he came to grief once when he hit a log that had floated free and parked itself in the middle of the channel. And I learned the lake from him.

The lower half of the lake was dotted with islands covered in willows and button bushes and was a paradise for shore birds and other bird life. We caught bass by the boatloads in the spring up in the mostly small coves and around those islands, and during the summer we caught a lot of big bass off the old stump fields.

When the normal lake level was raised a couple of feet in the late 60s, the islands were drowned, and gradully disappeared. The fishing declined drastically, both because of the loss of the islands and because the sudden popularity of bass fishing caused so much more pressure on the lake. With the loss of the islands, though, the lake lost much of the shallow cover that had provided a lot of bass food and other fertility. And the old stumps gradually rotted away or floated away. I pretty much stopped fishing the lake in the mid 1970s, and probably haven't been back to it a dozen times in the years since.

Well, looking at the lake on Google Earth was interesting, to say the least. The latest imagery was taken on Feb. 29, 2012, and the lake was either at winter pool or even a little below winter pool, which is usually five or six feet lower than summer pool. When you see aerial photos of the lake at that stage, you can see almost the entire river channel, and nearly all the structure, especially since the lake was also very clear at the time of the photos, so you can actually see shallow water up to what looks to be three feet deep or more. Back in the old days, I had an old USGS topo map that was made before the lake was built, and from it I could see where the channel was, but with that Google Earth imagery, it was even easier to see the old channel, as well as the old Otter Creek channel and some of the Lost Creek channel. You could see how shallow all the coves were, since most of them were almost entirely dry.

What struck me, remembering the way the lake once was, was how much it had changed. There simply aren't any stumps left at all. Places that used to have plenty of water were now filled in with silt and sand, especially around the mouths of some of the coves. The lake looks VERY sterile, with almost no cover at all that would be submerged at summer pool. Seeing it like that and remembering the way it was, it amazes me that people still catch decent numbers of bass from it.

At any rate, if you fish the lake some but are not entirely familiar with it, you can learn a LOT from the Google Earth photos.

[Guest]

Google earth is a fantastic way to learn a new body of water or get familiar with an old one.

Bing Maps is excellent in certain areas, but you have to zoom all the way down.

Then rotate the view to produce different years of aerial photos.

Its amazing what you can find using both maps in combination.

[Old plug]

I have not been down there in in I guess at least 30 yrs. My cousins daughter and her husband owned Choania Landing at one time. I do not know what there name was but my cousins daughters first name was Karen. I spent a lot of time on

Clearwater as well. For the last 20 years I have been firmly planted here on LOZ.

[Mitch f]

That lake has always been just a pipe dream for me to fish. As a child I passed the Greenville bridge in a light green Galaxy 500 too many times to count on the way to Paragould Arkansas to visit my grandparents. My brother and I looking out the rear windows watching boats fishing and wishing we were there. I've seen that parking lot flood out too many times to count and have heard many stories of busted lower units in the stump fields. I have also fished below the dam, wading once though and caught nothing.

Last year I actually pulled over and threw a jig at the base of the bridge pilings and caught a small spotted bass. It's just amazing, and quite depressing actually why some lakes go thru the gradual declining phase and some seem to keep producing year after year like LOZ. This might be a great subject for another thread.

[Geoff]

I have only been there once and it was probably 15+ yeard ago but it was shallow as all get out then too. I couldnt tell you how many times our boat got stuck just from drifting. we hit the bottom probably every 20 minutes before we decided that boating was over.

[Al Agnew]

I spent some more time last night after posting this looking at the lake, and did note that, in the upper half of the lake, you can see a few stumps left if you zoom it down pretty tight. Some of the old stump fields are completely gone, but in a few of them that I remembered there are a few stumps scattered about, mostly just out of the water or just in the water at the level depicted. It's really rather surprising that any are left...after all, the lake is now more than 60 years old. If you look at the lower half of the lake, you can see a couple of places where mud flats go almost completely across the lake with only a narrow gap where the old river channel cuts through. Those mud flats were where many of the islands once were, and the gaps between the islands were all full of stumps. Now they are nothing but slick mud flats. The coves in the upper lake used to have narrow but deep channels leading off the main lake and up into the coves, and then the coves widened and spread out and gradually shallowed. Now there are nothing but mud flats where those deep channels used to be. There was once a couple of terrific stump fields where the island is above Holliday Landing. The channel then went around the west side of the island, and the east side was shallower. Right at the head of the island, the channel kinda crashed into the island and there was a huge logjam dropping off into the deep channel water at the upstream point of the island, and then the channel veered off away from the point, and tucked into the area just on the west side of the island between the channel and the island was a stump field of huge stumps, about 7 feet deep at normal pool and dropping off into the channel. We caught a LOT of big bass off that stump field, including an 8 pounder than my mom caught (Dad never caught one that big) and one I hooked and got to the boat before it got off that we all swore would have gone 10 pounds. One time in that spot, we took 10 bass there that weighed a total of 55 pounds in little over a half hour of fishing. Another time we caught 7 bass that weighed 43 pounds as fast as we could get them in and make another cast.

The day we caught the 10 bass mentioned above, we had put in at Chaonia Landing, and we came back to the landing and showed the fish to the owners (sorry to say, we kept all the big bass we caught in those days--still don't really know why, as even then we knew the smaller ones were better to eat). They insisted on getting a picture of them to hang on their bulletin board. This was in August, and it had been a sweltering day and was still hot at 6 PM, so the Polaroid snapshot they took had Dad, Mom, and me holding up the fish hung to a long pole. Dad had his shirt unbuttoned and his chest showing, and I was dressed only in shorts, no shirt. Only mom was dressed more or less modestly. We were all darkly tanned from having spent the summer on the lake and otherwise outdoors.

The next week, we stopped by the landing after fishing for the day, and noticed the picture was up on the board. As we walked up to look at it, a couple of big, fat redneck looking guys were staring at it, and we heard one of them say, "I cain't believe them (very bad word for African Americans) caught all them bass!"

[Mitch f]

The next week, we stopped by the landing after fishing for the day, and noticed the picture was up on the board. As we walked up to look at it, a couple of big, fat redneck looking guys were staring at it, and we heard one of them say, "I cain't believe them (very bad word for African Americans) caught all them bass!"

You must have been really tanned!!!! LOL

[snap]

I haven't ventured there to try it, but I do know of a couple of different older gentlemen......and do not know each other......... that swear by this lake as a crappie paradise........!!!

[jdmidwest]

The lake still produces fish in good numbers, but I seldom fish the lake any more. It has a great redear population in the spring if the flood waters are up you can catch great numbers off old gravel roads. Crappie fair to getting better. The bass have not been as good as it was in the years following the formation of the lake. My uncle used to tell me stories about the 6 and 7 lb's he caught regularly back then.

My favorites are the white bass runs in the spring and drum fishing, both were great around the Old Greenville access. I spent many hours there as a kid drowning nightcrawlers I picked up off an old stretch of blacktop that was 67 originally north of town. You could peel back the turf that was overtaking the road and pick them up by the hundreds in the spring. I used to sell them to bait shops when I was in HS for spending money.

The actual lake line starts above Greenville, but it is essentially a river unless there is high water. I have run under the old 67 bridge in a big flood year and almost touched the bottom of the bridge. Water backed up that year above HWY 34 at Patterson.

Waterfowl use the area and the Corps have drawings for blind spots each year.

Grandad's old farm where he was raised was flooded by the lake and he was forced to move out. Many stories of the area were told by him before he passed. I have fished the fields he plowed as a kid. He walked several miles to Old Greenville to go to school. He met Grandma and courted her down by Shook. He told stories of the Panther Den cave near his old farm and catching fish out of there when it flooded. Some of the fields he worked are now timbered islands along the river.

Sulpher Spring is a rather large spring that has been totally flooded by the lake. But it is a good place to fish in the winter.

[Al Agnew]

I was never quite sure exactly where the outlet to Sulphur Spring is, but it looks on the imagery like there is a spring bubbling up in the mud flat at the upper end of the Sulphur Spring bluff. The biggest spring that was covered by the lake was Blue Spring, which was something like the 15th biggest spring in Missouri. It still flows, and in fact if you know what you're looking for, you can see it on the Google imagery. At the base of the first bluff on the left (east side) below Holliday Landing, you can see an area of deeper, more blueish green between the bluff bank and the point of the mud flat at the upper end of the bluff. There were times when the water was low as it is in the imagery that you could actually see the spring boiling the surface.