5-26-13

[cReekFishin]

Took a float from the 160 bridge to Delaware Town (much longer float than I anticipated) No luck with bass. A couple 10 inchers is all. The highlight of my day was a 14in crappie caught near Rivercut on a 7in motor oil worm. Last thing I expected to catch!! Other than that it was a pretty disappointing day.

[Osage]

I haven't been up that far in years. That's pretty skinny water. There use to be a bad place with ledges about a mile or so above Blue Springs. Kind of hard to get through.

Lot's of folks are surprised when they catch crappie out of James River but they are native, just like the walleye. It's the smallmouth that are the newcomers. They've only been here in the Ozarks the last 100 years or so.

[Al Agnew]

I haven't been up that far in years. That's pretty skinny water. There use to be a bad place with ledges about a mile or so above Blue Springs. Kind of hard to get through.

Lot's of folks are surprised when they catch crappie out of James River but they are native, just like the walleye. It's the smallmouth that are the newcomers. They've only been here in the Ozarks the last 100 years or so.

Not true about the smallmouth. They are native to all the Ozark streams with the possible exception of the Osage and Gasconade river systems, and most biologists consider them native to those streams as well. The Ozarks even has its own subspecies of smallmouth, the Neosho, that apparently lived nowhere else.

[vonreed]

Wow, from 160 to Delaware Town is a long float, especially the first half. It's no wonder you didn't catch much with having to paddle all that way in 1 day. I've done it before the first time I floated it, but that was before I knew of all the access points along the way when I was still in high school. That crappie would be a shocker for sure. I've seen several that got gigged around the

Delaware Town access before on the river.

[RSBreth]

That's a long float through the least productive stretch. I don't know why but I've never consistently caught decent Bass up there.

[aarchdale@coresleep.com]

Is it true that crappie with the black stripe diwn there back are James river natives. Seems like I read that somewhere once an I've beer caught one with that anywhere but table rock

[RSBreth]

Those Crappie are in the James and Finley, too. The ones I catch at the park in Ozark all have that stripe, as do the ones in Linden.

[cReekFishin]

I don't know why is so unproductive. There are lots of deep holes with lots of cover. I have more luck fishing the stretch from shelvin rock to hooten town, and that area gets a lot more pressure. And the crappie I caught did have the stripe on its back. I had never seen that before.

[Al Agnew]

I floated that stretch once, a couple years ago in May, and also found it to be pretty mediocre fishing. As I remember, I caught one very nice spotted bass about 17 inches, but only a couple of smallmouth and a few spots and largemouth. But I caught some really big bluegill and green sunfish, especially for a stream. The highlight of my trip was the very big copperhead that swam right past the front end of my canoe on its way to a log jam below, where it got out to sun itself, apparently. I thought I was going to have to beat it off the canoe with the paddle.

[RSBreth]

I try to hit it at least once a year to just to check it out, but I never catch any big Bass - don't know why.