Report From 05/19/2013 On A Meramec Basin Tributary

[Smalliebigs]

see ya

[ColdWaterFshr]

Nice largemouth, Scott. How can you be disappointed with those fish, especially yours?

[stlfisher]

A couple nice fish for sure. If it makes you feel any better i was asking myself the same thing on the Mineral Fork yesterday. Smallmouth seemed to have dissapeared. I am hoping it was just one of those day and not the poachers we ran into.

[Smalliebigs]

see ya

[Greasy B]

Good fish,

Yesterday I made my first trip to a favorite creek after leaving it alone during last years drought. We found good numbers but for the life of me I couldnt put the hook into anything bigger than 13. Heck, I spent 8 hours fish watching and only see a couple of fish I would call quality. Did the poachers get them? Was it the drought or were the larger fish hunkered down in a post spawn funk?

[Gavin]

Good for you Scott...couldnt round up anything bigger than 15" on the Gasconade last friday...Think the big ones are in a funk right now..

[UnCivE]

Same for me last Saturday on the G-nade...

[cnr]

Same for me. 2 weeks ago everything was over 16" and were fat n sassy. The other day we caught tons of small fish and only 2 15" fish. Maybe all the big fish are on deeper beds? I saw some small ones on shallow beds but nothing of any size. Well. I'm at least in great company right now!

[Al Agnew]

I find that unless you sight fish to big fish you can see on beds (which I won't do), this can be one of the poorer times to catch big fish, when they are either on beds or just finishing spawning. In another two or three weeks things should start to pick up.

I floated a stretch of another Meramec tributary last Friday, and while I caught 51 fish, there were long stretches where I caught little or nothing. Lots of beds visible, but the majority were no longer in use and the algae was starting to grow on them. Maybe 25% were still occupied. Interestingly, many of the beds were in spots that would have been perfect bedding spots in higher water, being smallish eddies off the main current, but at the near normal level the stream was at that point, they were shallow and some of them were in very slack water pockets that, with another six inches less water, would have been close to being cut off from the channel entirely. Apparently the bass started spawning on that trib as soon as the river was "un-flooded".

Only caught one good one, a very thick but not big-bellied 18 incher.

[Haris122]

Still pretty sweet Smallie, and I find the humans about to spawn pretty funny. Reminds me of one of those videos on youtube or somewhere, with that one fishermen that takes his boat straight past this porno shoot on the banks. Anyway,s those fish are still pretty awesome.