Running the Meramec with an outboard?

[Gavin]

The Gasconade has major issues with bad land management practices...Lots of cows, and eroding banks with no trees on them.

 

[Dances With Smallies]

2 hours ago, Seth said:

Did the rivers flood as often back then? It seems we get a major flood every other year these days. Every time that happens, the riffles seem to change a lot on the Gasconade. They just seem to fill in more and more each time we get high water instead of getting cleaned out. There are several points that the floods have taken out for me too that I miss. They used to hold a lot of fish.

Man, that's the truth.  One of my favorite fishing holes on the Upper Illinois River in eastern Oklahoma got all jacked up with the floods last year (I think it was last year).  It basically channelized the spot.  Sorry for the abysmal drawing.

 

 

 

[Al Agnew]

The more development you get within the watershed, the more floods you get and the higher the floods are.  Couple that with clearing of the riparian vegetation (the trees along the river) right up to the edge of the channel, and you get more eroding  banks and shifting channels.  On the other hand, there are probably many areas within the watershed of these rivers that are in better shape than they were a few decades ago.  As for floods, I was curious about whether floods on the Meramec are more frequent now, or larger now, than they once were.  Fortunately, you can easily find that out by looking at "time series--daily data" on any of the USGS gauges, and typing in the entire period of record in the box.  Here's the graph of the Meramec near Sullivan, from 1921 to the present:

As you can see, there's a missing period from sometime in the early 1930s to the middle 1940s.  Other than that, figure that any flow over 10,000 cfs is a significant flood.  There were some periods where there were few if any floods of that volume or more--the early 1930s, the first half of the 1950s, from about 1975 to the early 1980s, and actually there weren't very many floods between 1999 and 2008.  But overall, it doesn't look like there has been a huge increase in floods in recent years.  On the other hand, there have been two record class floods since 2008, and only two others of that class in all the time previous.

My own very unscientific observations are that floods do seem more destructive now than they were when I first started fishing the Meramec in the 1970s. I seem to see more well-wooded banks, banks that theoretically should be resistant to flood damage, being torn up. Yet it appears there aren't significantly more or larger floods now than then.  So why do they seem more destructive?  What has changed?  Hint: jetboats first appeared in significant numbers on the Meramec in the mid to late 1980s.

[Blazerman]

When we rented our place on the meramec, the 73 flood was at the time one of the worst any one could remember. And the 82 flood was also really bad. 

I believe those two earlier floods were in the class that did a lot of destruction and changed the river in many spots.

[Al Agnew]

The '73 flood wasn't a big deal on the Meramec...there have been a lot of floods that big and bigger.  "82 flood was a different story, one of the 4 biggest floods ever recorded on the middle Meramec.  But I fished the river a lot back in those days and can tell you that it didn't really change the river as much as any big flood does these days.  The banks simply seem more unstable now.

[fishinwrench]

On 9/16/2016 at 11:27 AM, Mitch f said:

Any you can also win any bass tournament with a Zebco 202?

And if decent baitcaster/spinning rigs cost as much as a jet boat you'd see that done all the time.  ?