Pursuing Winter River Walleye

[Flysmallie]

[trythisonemv]

me three

[Hog Wally]

There are five spots from route 66 park to hwy 30 bridge that hold Walleye all year round but, very soon they will be very good. I fish these five spots pretty much and know them very well. The Walleye will move in and out of these areas so it is important to either stay there and wait for the fish or just get lucky and pull up when they are feeding. Because this is an online forum I will not devuldge these spots but, if you were to pm me and I got to know you a little and we built up a trust I would be very happy to tell you very specific areas to go nail some eyes.

[Hog Wally]

I agree. It's a small fishery. There is some serious fish in that stretch but I've found that if you find that little spot it's chock full of them and some are what I would call Giants I can't post pictures but I've shared some pictures of big walleye and most recently I caught a 9 lb hybrid striper in one of those hot spots. Usually they are with the walleye. Hint hint. It's just not a smart thing to tell all. Smallie bigs gave me some approximents and I lucked into his honey hole . On the middle meramec where I live it's a matter of the biggest deepest holes with a gravel dump off riffle. I spend most of my fishing time chasing walleye on the rivers. I don't think it's nearly as complicated as people think. There's just not a lot of em. Think hard about every detail of when where and how you caught it. If u catch one that is.

[Smalliebigs]

I agree. It's a small fishery. There is some serious fish in that stretch but I've found that if you find that little spot it's chock full of them and some are what I would call Giants I can't post pictures but I've shared some pictures of big walleye and most recently I caught a 9 lb hybrid striper in one of those hot spots. Usually they are with the walleye. Hint hint. It's just not a smart thing to tell all. Smallie bigs gave me some approximents and I lucked into his honey hole . On the middle meramec where I live it's a matter of the biggest deepest holes with a gravel dump off riffle. I spend most of my fishing time chasing walleye on the rivers. I don't think it's nearly as complicated as people think. There's just not a lot of em. Think hard about every detail of when where and how you caught it. If u catch one that is.

Hahahahha....Aaron you forgot more than I will ever know about the Meramec and it's fish....after meeting you and fishing with you....my passion for chasing eyes was rejuvenated...trust me Hog wally is the MAN!!! He catches some serious fish no doubt....and your analysis of the lower meramec is spot on....it's tough because the spots the fish are in are limited and not big...I have said this before if you can catch fish there you can catch fish anywhere IMO...and I know you catch them there....you should have seen the hybrid this dude caught...talk about whales

[Hog Wally]

Flattery will get you everywhere . Let's go !

[Smalliebigs]

Eh....it's very true....I have never met anyone in my 35 years of fishing the Meramec that knows every riffle, root wad and boulder like you do. Plus you are on the river enough to know all the changes that have occurred since the last water event. I know it sounds like total fluff on my part but, when I fish with guys like Hog Wally or Mitch F and you see their skill set and watch them just banging one fish after another...we'll it's really something to behold. I know guys read some of these reports from some of these guys and probably think they are full of crap but, they aren't. ...they catch and release more big fish with not much fanfare like they are on a stroll thru the park...it's very impressive to me. The bonus about Aaron is he's cool as hell and will treat you like a long lost friend if you fish with him.

[MOsmallies]

Aaron is a real solid dude and is definitely one of the better Meramec anglers out there... Especially the tempermental Lower Meramec! He has more success on the Lower Meramec in one day trips than most will have in their lifetime. I really wanna learn the Lower Mac this year!!

[Al Agnew]

I agree with Hog Wally too...they aren't too complicated to catch IF you can find them and stick with them. The best hole on lower Black River, the Keener Spring Hole, was at one time a mile long,three or four times the normal width of the river, and much of it was between 15 and 45 feet deep, so it was almost like fishing a riverine lake. The two easiest to figure spots were the head of the pool where a riffle came into the pool with a huge, deep eddy off to the side, and the lower end, where the river shallowed abruptly from 30 feet deep into the riffle, with Keener Spring coming in just above the riffle. But of course those two spots always had people parked on them, and everybody else had to fish other parts of the pool. Almost everybody fished from the banks, even if they were in a boat...the conventional wisdom then was that you couldn't catch them drifting from a boat, and even to still fish from the boat you had to have it very well anchored. Everybody fished with big live minnows; some guys bought goldfish, but most trapped big stonerollers in a few creeks which were well-guarded secrets, because not many creeks had plenty of 5-6 inch stonerollers in the winter. I knew a couple of those creek spots, but for quite a while I didn't live close to them, so I found creeks that at least had some big creek chubs and shiners, and seined them for my bait.

The big pool had been formed by a dredgeline that was anchored on the river-left bank in four spots, where the gravel operation was. The other end was a movable anchor on the opposite bank, that would be moved in 30-40 ft. increments. What this resulted in was a pool with ridges on the bottom coming off that opposite bank every 30 feet or so (the spots between where the drag line was anchored at each movement), and troughs radiated from those anchoring spots to the four main anchors on the left bank. The drag line would be changed from one pair of anchor points to a crossing pair, so the bottom was actually crisscrossed with troughs and the middle and toward the left bank ended up being dug out almost completely, but the ridges between the movable anchors on the river right bank remained. I tell you all this so you can understand the bottom structure. At that time, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, structure fishing was first being publicized, and some guys, myself included, tried to relate what we were reading to the structure of that pool, trying to figure out better how to catch those walleye. What it took a while to figure out, though, was that current also played a huge part in the figuring out the best locations. What we finally figured out that the absolute best points and ridges were those where the current came almost straight into the point and separated there, with an eddy curling around upstream while the main current turned and went downstream. The main current swirled along down the pool, so there were two or three points that had that current set-up, but the best one was the farthest upstream where the main current first hit the bank after coming out of the riffle and across the pool.

A buddy and I would drive into the Keener resort and hike almost a mile up to that uppermost point. If there was nobody up at the riffle, we'd flip a coin and whoever lost would go on up to the riffle and fish there, while the winner fished the point. If there was already somebody at the riffle, the loser got to fish the next point downstream, which had current sweeping across it and was good, but not as good as that one point. The biggest walleye I ever caught, a 12.5 pounder, came from up at the riffle when I lost the coin flip, but it was the only fish I caught, while my buddy caught 15 that day, the biggest about 8 pounds, as I remember.

That was also the day that he had planned for. We always wondered where the fish went for most of the day, because sitting in one spot like that all day, there were long periods with no action, and short flurries when you'd get several bites almost at once. Most days there would be three flurries of action; one early in the morning, one sometime in mid-afternoon, and the best one was always right before dark. Did the fish continually move up and down the pool? You could catch fish at other points, and at the lower end...were those all part of the same school or were there different schools in that huge pool?

So my buddy's plan was, when he caught one, he was going to inflate a balloon, tie it to a 50 ft. length of fishing line, tie the other end to the fish and turn it loose, and watch where the balloon went. Sure enough, he carried out the plan, and the balloon went out over the downstream trough and sat there the rest of the day. So was that fish just freaked out from being attached to a balloon, or did the whole school spend most of the day out there inactive in the trough, and move up onto the point to feed a few times a day?

I could spend all night telling stories about "jack fishing" back in those days. We were all convinced that the next world record was swimming in that pool. My buddy's biggest was a 15 pounder, and I saw a couple caught that were over 17 pounds. I had two up almost to me, close enough to see them well, that I'm still convinced were over 18 pounds. I caught lots of 5-7 pounders, but that 12.5 was the only time I broke the ten pound barrier.

[LittleRedFisherman]

Great comments, and neat story Al! I know one old fella that lives at Doniphan that has consistently caught winter walleye for decades, I actually had the chance to fish with him once about 14 years ago. I got the idea how to do it, but didn't have any luck that day, but he would always rig another pole with a catfish worm with stink bait? At first I was thinking what the heck, but that day the walleye just didn't bite, but those holes we fished also had Channel cats in them, we caught 27 head of 1 to 3 pound channels that day, and even caught 8 to 10 of them on the "Creek Chubs" he brought with him from Doniphan. His grandson actually helps me on the farm, and he was gonna set up a date for us to go with him, but he's struggling with a battle with Lung Cancer so he's not got to fish this winter unfortunaly, but he's the real deal on those walleyes. He like to fish the Arkansas side of the Current river, my neighbor has been catching some on both sides of the line he says, but none with any size this year.

It was mentioned above about waiting on a rain event, well that "old fella" I mentioned has elaborated on that in the past, when we was having the drought a couple years back, he was going on the white river somewhere to catch the big ones, he said a lot of those larger fish migragted up the Current river in the winter when we got some rain, I wasn't sure about that thinking, but his success catching them can't be denied. Anyhow, i'm looking forward to trying, i'm actually off tomorrow to go fish, but gonna try some more cold water bassing and maybe some crappie, thinking the water temps just took a nosedive, but we will see. Trying the walleye next week, I will post win lose or draw on how it goes!!