A Minnesota River...

[Al Agnew]

It might seem a little strange to describe this past week without naming the river. After all, it's in Minnesota, not the Ozarks, so what harm could it do to name it to the mostly Missouri and Arkansas folks on this website?

But, although there are some well known smallmouth streams in Minnesota, this isn't one of them. In fact, a Google search on the fishing on this river would find statements like "this isn't a good gamefish river". The person who pointed us toward it said he seldom sees more than one boat fishing it on a weekend. We saw two boats on it other than our own party in three days of fishing. And, there are only two good fishing sections, one of about 3.5 miles, the other of about 5 miles. It couldn't take much pressure. And to be honest, I fully plan on going back next year and would just as soon not take the chance of seeing a couple of jetboats with Missouri registration numbers sharing those few precious miles with me. Some near secrets are just too good to widely share.

It all started when Corey (cwc on here) called me a couple weeks ago and asked if I could go with him on a trip to Minnesota to fish for smallmouth. Now as much as I love smallies, I figured Mary would not like the idea of me taking a week off without her, since both of us have been working hard but I've also had two good overnight floats in the last two weeks but she hasn't had any time to play. But she actually encouraged me to go because she knew I'd have a great time. I love that woman.

The plan was to fish a well-known Minnesota river, which I won't name because the stream we ended up fishing is a tributary. There aren't too many well-known rivers in the Land of Lakes, though...

Corey's friends had left the Friday before and were to fish over the weekend and give us the scoop when we arrived. Their reports on the big river were not encouraging. Minnesota had been getting steady rains for the last two weeks, and it was high and way off color. But Corey's friend Bill knew about this tributary. A couple of lakes on it let the silt settle, and it was still clear, though considerably higher than normal. They caught some good fish on it during the one day they tried it. And there was always the hope that the bigger river would clear enough to fish.

So we left Missouri Monday morning, arriving at the hotel near the big river at 11 PM Monday night, surrounded by thunderstorms the whole way up to Minnesota but lucking out in that we avoided driving through any of them. We were up at dawn Tuesday, with clear skies and 55 degree weather, a far cry from the heat in Missouri.

The big river was still muddy, so we made our way to the tributary, let's call it Mystic River. My first view was of roiling, brownish green water coming over the low dam, 75 yards wide and hard to tell how deep. It looked high, which it was, and it looked very murky, which it wasn't; I wasn't used to seeing tannic stained water. Once we backed Corey's jetboat in and got on the water, we could see that it had about 4 feet of visibility. We could also tell it was shallow, with very little of the channel more than 4 feet deep. Bill was fishing from his own boat, and he started drifting down the same side as the ramp while Corey and I went up beneath the dam before starting down the other bank. We were disappointed to catch nothing below the dam, and for the first few hundred yards downstream. I finally broke the ice on my homemade crankbait with a nice 15 incher. Corey caught one about the same size on a topwater soon after.

Understand, these are not like Ozark 15 inchers. Every fish we would catch was a classic example of northern smallies, very slab-sided, tall from back to belly fish with small heads and heavy bodies. And in that current they fought like demons.

The fishing remained somewhat slow, however, as we tried various lures, and the first half mile or so was a period of figuring them out. We would eventually discover that the fishing simply wasn't that good in the first mile. It wasn't until the river slowed a bit that the fishing picked up.

It was Corey who hit upon using Superflukes. The river was weedy, with big beds of aquatic weeds and lots of grass bits floating, even matting against obstructions. In those conditions, a soft jerkbait rigged so that it was weedless was a natural choice, and the fish loved it. Corey caught several 17 inchers on it while I continued to experiment with other lures as we drifted further and further downstream. I was catching a fish now and then, but he was catching more. And then I put on one of my homemade Subwalks, and in a little eddy behind a downed tree, it was attacked by a huge fish. I fought the thing for a long time, finally getting it right up to the boat, and then it made one more powerful dive and came loose. The split ring holding the belly treble to the lure had been straightened! It was probably the biggest fish either of us hooked the whole trip.

I finally broke down and put on a Superfluke as well, and we figured out the pattern. In the higher than normal water, the fish were in eddies along the bank, but they also had to have logs. There were scattered big boulders both along the bank and out in the current, but we never once caught a fish off a rock. Everything that first day was on logs, or just along stretches of clear, relatively deep banks. Nothing came from out in the middle and nothing came from those weedbeds except pike. If the eddy along the bank was too big, it would have a pike instead of a bass, and we tried to avoid the pike because they bit off our lures several times.

We drifted all the way down that one bank to the big river, then motored back upstream to fish down the opposite bank behind Bill. There was one stretch that had several channels between islands, and we eventually fished around all the islands. Bill parked his boat at a deeper pool downstream of some old bridge pilings and proceeded to catch a bunch of fish out in the middle of the pool on finesse worms, so there WERE fish in the middle in places, but Corey and I were loving the fluke bite.

We fished that 3.5 mile stretch all day, and there were times when the fishing was slow, but at the end of the day we'd caught about 45 smallies between the two of us (and one lonely largemouth). And the kicker was, only TWO of them were under 15 inches. We both caught several of 18 to 18.5 inches, and those fish were probably close to four pounds each, given their extremely heavy bodies. And Bill was apologizing, saying the fishing was really off.

Wednesday we went to the other good stretch, starting at the upper end of a lake and heading upstream. The put-in was interesting. The ramp was okay, and went down into water of adequate depth, but then there was a barely submerged sandbar separating it from the river, which we had to get out and drag over. Bill told us that there was a feeder stream coming in five miles upstream, and while you could run the river farther than that, it was shallower, with a sand bottom, and the fishing wasn't nearly as good. Corey and I, thinking like true Ozarkians, figured that surely the fishing would be better where it was higher up and more difficult to get to, so we went ahead and ran two miles farther than the feeder stream. Bill was right. In that two miles, I caught exactly one 15 incher. Corey got nothing but pike. We got back down to the feeder, and Bill was catching fish at the confluence. I immediately nailed a 17 incher on a Sexy Dawg, and then another, an 18 incher. We caught a couple more around the confluence and then began drifting on downstream.

This section of the river was not your typical smallmouth stream. It was wide, shallow, sand-bottomed, with only one real riffle below the confluence. There were scattered weedbeds in the channel. The banks were rocky in a few places but mostly just covered in grass. Even logs and fallen trees were in short supply. We were catching very little. I got one good strike on a buzzbait out in the channel where there was a slight drop-off, missing the fish, and for a bit we thought that might be the key. But it wasn't.

When I finally caught a fish, it came out of a tiny matt of loose grass right up against the bank in a foot of water, and it made a wake like a submarine when it charged my fluke from four feet away. It was big. I was excited. It took a long time to get it in. It measured a bit over 19 inches, and I would seriously guess its weight at pushing five pounds.

But we'd figured out the pattern. The fish were really tight to the bank and only in places where they could get under something, and often that something was just grass growing on the bank and hanging out over the water. You had to cast tight to the grass, and you had to make a lot of casts to nondescript grassy banks, but sooner or later you'd get a fish. And these fish averaged bigger than the day before. I caught another big one, 19.5 inches and even thicker than the first one, on a tube flipped right up against a clump of grass. We each caught a number between 18 and 19 inches, and Corey, who was a bit disgruntled because I was catching all the big ones from the back of the boat (after he'd outfished me the first day) finally tallied a 19.5 incher.

The forecast for this day had been for an 80% chance of heavy thunderstorms. About noon the clouds which had hung around all morning thickened. We were watching the radar on our cell phones, and there was a huge storm building to the southwest, with all kinds of heavy thunderstorm, high wind, and large hail warnings, moving northeast. Another, smaller storm built up to the northwest. It looked like we were in for it. We had fished back down to near the ramp, and we hung around there for a bit until it started sprinkling and the thunder was getting louder. We dragged the boat over the sandbar, parked it at the ramp, and headed for the truck, and the rain stopped. We sat in the truck for a good 45 minutes, windows closed because the mosquitoes were thick outside, and finally decided that, to heck with it, we were going fishing.

Back over the sandbar and out on the water, the thunder gradually quieted, and about 6 PM the sun briefly shone. It was at that point that I'd switched over to the Sexy Dawg and was catching a few fish on top. I cast to a grassy point, and the water simply exploded. I set the hooks and a second later the big smallie cleared the water 20 feet out toward the middle. That fish may have been the strongest smallmouth I've ever had on the end of my line. I finally got it in and held it up in near awe. It was a legitimate 20 incher that was hugely slab-sided and had to weigh well over five pounds. I've caught longer river smallies, but none that I'm sure weighed that much.

All total, we only caught around 25 that day, but NONE were under 15 inches, and probably only five or six were under 17 inches.

We were awakened at 5 AM Wednesday night by a huge storm. The wind pounded rain and hail against the window of our room, and the electricity went out. The storm finally passed as day broke, and we dressed and went outside to trees down everywhere and standing water in the streets. The truck radio was talking of flash flooding and widespread power outages. We figured our only chance to fish was below the dam where we'd fished the first day, and headed that way. The gravel road into the ramp ran for about a mile, and there were at least a dozen trees down across the road, but fortunately none of them completely covered the grassy, higher road shoulder, which was just barely wide enough to get up on and drive around the trees. We made it to the ramp, and the river was a few inches higher but still clear.

Instead of fishing from the ramp down, we motored downstream to the islands and began fishing there. In the higher water, spinnerbaits and my homemade crankbait began to produce. We caught fish steadily all the way to the big river, and then fished down it for three miles. The greater flow of Mystic River made that bank of the bigger stream clear water the whole three miles, and the fish were there. It seemed like every time we came to a log in any current along that bank, there would be a fish there, and they were mostly big, 17 inches minimum. Corey caught one just under 20 inches, and another that was only 17 inches but was actually thicker-bodied than the big one, and it was thick. That 17 incher looked almost like a bluegill in shape. Corey was actually talking to a friend from back in Missouri on his cell phone, with it held between his shoulder and his ear, as he fished, and when that slab rolled on his spinnerbait and he saw that immensely wide side, he yelled, "Got a big one on, gotta hang up!", dropped the phone to the deck, and fought the fish.

We finally ran out of clear water and big fish in the big river, and headed back up into Mystic River. In the afternoon the pattern had changed, and the fluke was again the best lure choice, but on this afternoon there were no fish on logs at all, and still none on rocks or in the middle of the channel. Everything was along grassy banks with overhanging grass and some current. And were they ever there! they would dart out and engulf the fluke, causing these monstrous wakes and boils that were simply spectacular. They weren't all huge, but again, out of well over 60 fish caught, only three were under 15 inches. And it was a day of losing big fish which simply took us into brush or made wild lunges that broke the line...I lost my two favorite homemade crankbaits and several flukes to big ones. We were so tired by 6 PM we could barely cast. Corey looked at me and asked, "Are we done?" I said yes. He said, "One more cast." One more cast turned into another 15 minutes of fishing with nothing to show for it. He put down his rod and began to put away lures as the boat drifted away from the bank. But there was this little log along the grassy bank that was just irresistible. I had to make a long cast to reach it, but the fish was there. It was "only" 16 inches, but it was a final satisfaction. I held up the fish and admired it for a brief moment. "Now I'm done," I said.

Though I've had plenty of trips, even in the Ozarks, where I've caught more fish than this one, I've only had one trip that came close to comparing to the number of quality fish the two of us caught. It was true world class smallmouth fishing. Corey and I just couldn't stop talking about it and reliving it on the long drive home, while we continued the pattern of dodging thunderstorms. We can't imagine how good it could be if the big river was in good fishing shape to add more miles of fishing to the 8.5 magic miles of Mystic River.

I'll post some real fish porn pictures tomorrow!

[Mitch f]

Unless you've fished up north, it's hard to imagine what you are describing. Amazing trip, thanks for sharing!

[Guest]

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[fishinwrench]

Minnesota's fishing is awesome. Out of 9 days (3 different trips) that I have spent there I've never had a single "so-so" day, much less a bad one.

I did allow myself to get caught in a bad storm on BigBoy lake once and darn near got killed, but even on that day the fishing was off the charts.

If it weren't for those gawd-awful Winters I could be happy living/ working there.

[Greasy B]

Thanks for the report Al.

Mum’s the word.

[Smalliebigs]

Mums the word??? They are more paranoid than me...being secretive about places in Minnesota? ?? Wow that's paranoid...why not just not say anything?? I do understand the paranoia though

[Greasy B]

Ha, Ha,

I admit I have slipped a few times. For the most part a won’t tell my own mother about my favorite places. Of course if you want to meet me at the boat ramp I’ll tell you which one.

[Mitch f]

I remember fishing a river in Wisconsin. The river was nothing short of phenomenal for smallmouth.

We stayed at a hotel/gas station. You got a free donut and hot coffee at the gas station when you stayed at the hotel. In making small talk with the gas station owner, she was in disbelief that we drove up from St Louis to fish this particular river.

At that moment I figured out why the river was so darn awesome.

[Al Agnew]

The "paranoia" is because it apparently really is relatively unknown (if the locals know about it they don't care about the smallmouth fishing; they love those walleye) and it is a very limited section of river and not much fishing water. The fish were all pristine, no hook scars after a whole summer. I'd just rather not take the chance of that changing; even in a place like Minnesota it's pretty rare.

[Mitch f]

It's really not that big of a deal where it is.....in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michiagan, etc, the rivers are pretty much filled with huge smallmouth. Makes Missouri look like the little league in comparison. Even with the short growing season those fish live to 20 years old or more. You wouldn't have that down here with the eat anything that swims mentality.

Edited to say that they consider walleye THE fish to target. Serious bass fisherman are many times from out of state.