A Morning On The Creek...

[Al Agnew]

It wasn't until I was just a few minutes from the creek that I realized I had forgotten my good wading shoes, with felt inserts. I had on a pair of Crocs that I'd slipped on just to walk down to the basement to get my tackle together. I was planning to wade about three miles of creek, and this isn't an easy creek to wade. The upper portion is either slick bedrock or bars of basketball size rocks, and the lower portion is soft, fine gravel in many places. Crocs are designed for neither. The creek isn't far from the house, and I could have driven back home and picked up the wading shoes and lost only a half hour or so, but when it comes to creek fishing, nobody ever accused me of being the brightest bulb in the chandelier. What the heck, I could tough it out.

The little pool just below the bridge is about the size of an average living room, and 18 inches deep, with a couple of nice rocks. When I park at that bridge and start downstream I always make my first cast there and never catch anything. This time I caught a 12 inch smallie. It's several hundred yards and three or four little shallow pools like that before you get to the first decent pool, and this morning I caught fish in every one of those little pools. I caught seven before I got to that first piece of decent water.

"Decent" is a relative term on this creek. The first pool is about 100 feet long, 20 feet wide, and mostly about 2 feet deep, with a few nice rocks. The creek was flowing pretty strongly this morning; the riffle at the head of that pool was about 8 feet wide and 2 or 3 inches deep. Yet, in years past, before a few catch and keep anglers started pounding this creek and one complete doofus even named it on a message board in a glowing description of the fish he was catching, this little pool had given up very good fish, up to 19 inches, nearly every time I'd fished it.

My homemade walk the dog topwater plopped down in a foot of water just below the riffle, and a big wake charged it. The smallie smashed it on the third twitch. It really seemed bigger, in that small water, than what it actually was, but a fat 15 incher is fine with me. I noted that it was scarred around the lips, obviously having been caught and released recently. Oh well, at least it had been released. Halfway down the pool, another big wake shot off the bank to engulf the topwater. this one WAS bigger, a beautiful 17 incher. The pool produced several more nice strikes and a couple of smaller fish, one 12 incher of which had a gold bait hook stuck in the roof of its mouth, back near the throat. It appeared to have been cut off, so again, somebody had obviously been fishing this pool and releasing the fish. I hate leaving hooks in fish. How would you like it if you had to try to eat with a hook in your throat? I'd rather get the hook out the best way possible and take the chance of the fish dying from it quickly, rather than possibly suffering and eventually dying from the hook obstructing its feeding or getting infected. I've seen enough hooks left in bass mouths to know that, in spite of what some think, modern hooks don't rust away for a long time in a fish's body. Fortunately, with the pliers on my little multipurpose tool, getting the hook out of this one was easy.

With such an auspicious beginning, it was a bit of a disappointment that the next good pool produced only one small fish. And things didn't get as good again as I continued downstream. I was catching enough fish, and getting enough strikes that missed, to keep things interesting, but I was revising my guess of how many I'd catch in the three miles of creek from the 70s to the 50s, and then the 40s. Many of the best pools produced very little, and then I'd come to a mediocre pool that would hold some nice fish. I was beginning to suspect that one of the meat hogs had come in off private property to pound this part of the creek, because the fishing should have been getting better, not worse, and the meat hogs seem to concentrate on the few nice pools and skip the little shallow ones.

There's one good looking spot, the riffle gradually widening, and then swirling into a root wad with a good, 4 foot deep pocket around the roots. Below, the pool continues about 12-18 inches deep for 50 feet, then gets just a little deeper around a cluster of boulders. I've never caught a nice fish out of the root wad, but I remembered that cluster of boulders. Last year when I'd done this wade, I'd made a long cast to the boulders and a big fish had taken the lure and immediately lunged beneath the biggest boulder, snagging the lure and pulling free.

So, I made a long cast, there was a big wake, the lure was engulfed, and the big fish did exactly the same thing, with exactly the same results! One of these days I'll get that fish, somehow.

The real key, I believe, as to why this tiny creek produces big smallmouth is that it's chock full of big stoneroller minnows. Stonerollers are fat, and they just have to be very nutritious. Once smallmouth get big enough to utilize them, they should grow well. Another key to the habitat, which at first glance is so poor that a lot of anglers wouldn't even think of fishing this creek, is that it has boulders lying on bedrock in some of the better spots, and the fish CAN get under those boulders to escape many of their predators. Case in point is a particular little pool up against a low bluff. This pool is about 70 feet long, and mostly a foot deep, with nowhere more than two feet deep. Yet it always produces several nice fish. It has more smallmouth (and big goggle-eye) in it than one would ever expect. Today it produced several smallies, including one that was about 15 inches, and multiple swings and misses from a bigger fish that looked to be in the 17-18 inch class. I knew the fish were there because last year I'd encountered them as well, and had taken the time to really examine the pool. There's a boulder about 5 feet across, lying in two feet of water on bedrock, and I'd watched last year as at least a dozen smallies of decent size fled from my explorations and disappeared beneath that rock.

Below that point the creek begins to slow, the bottom turns to finer gravel, and the pools get a little longer, though not much deeper. One beautiful run is very narrow, no more than 15 feet wide, and 2-3 feet deep, with overhanging tree limbs and nice rocks along one side. It's not easy to fish because of the tree limbs, being almost a tunnel through the trees, but it usually holds a couple of big fish. This time I got a swing and miss from one big one, and caught one small fish.

The last mile seems to be fished hard, but there are a few pools that still produce good fish. I caught a very fat 16 incher on a buzzbait in one of those spots, but what was once my best big fish pool gets more and more shallow every year, and this year it's hardly worth fishing.

Mary was waiting for me at my "take-out", and she asked me how I did. Well, 34 smallmouth and 5 largemouth in 3 miles of creek is not bad at all. But I was realizing how tired and sore I was from slipping and sliding in those danged Crocs. I needed some aspirin.

[2sheds]

Great read, as always, Al !

Thanks for sharing your success.

[Justin Spencer]

Nice report! I fish in crocs in the summertime when I don't have to really walk, but once last year I was waiting for some canoes to get in and I went up to the top of the island at our landing, probably a quarter mile or so. I immediately waded out and slipped losing my croc. I laid a perfect cast on top of my shoe and starting retrieving it, unfortunately it came unhooked and I had to pussyfoot it back on what must be the sharpest rocks in all of the Ozarks, then I had to load canoes with one shoe on. Not ideal, can't remember if I caught anything.

[MOsmallies]

Al - I think I have only fished that creek once in the last three years due to the amount of people that fish it now and decline in numbers and size of fish. It makes me sick to think about the way it is now compared to the way it was 10 years ago. Glad you caught some nice ones and you saw signs of catch and release. It just doesn't hold the same allure as it used to for me.

[Al Agnew]

You're right, it's nowhere near as good as it was even five years ago. For a while it was simply amazing, given the apparent poor habitat and small size. It's still a little better than what it "should" be.