Bad fishing, good memories, great day

[Al Agnew]

Wednesday...forecast for very little wind, sunny skies, highs in the mid 70s.  How many days in the middle of November do you get like this?  I was going fishing no matter what.  Mary wanted to get on the river.  I suggested somewhere on the Meramec in the jetboat.  No, Mary would prefer a canoe float.  That sounded okay to me...but where to go?  I asked her if she wanted to float Big River.  "Someplace I haven't been."  I thought, and thought some more, and suggested the Blackwell to Hwy. 21 float.  It's about six miles, maybe a little less, which not only would suit Mary because she usually thinks every one of our floats is about a mile too long, and because I didn't think I'd ever taken her on that one, but also because since I know a guy, both put-in and take-out would be easy (If you don't know the guy, the put-in at Blackwell is worthy of several dirty words.)  As for the fishing...well, the guy I know said that his son had fished around Blackwell the week before and "tore 'em up".  And I remembered a warm day during deer season years ago when I definitely tore 'em up.  So I was pumped to do the float.

Until, that is, I saw the river as we put in.  It was clear...no, not clear, clear as gin.  Clear as air (almost).  And low.  In the summer this is usually murky water.  On the rare occasions when it had been this clear, I'd never caught much of anything.  But maybe this time would be different.

The hole starting at Blackwell is a solid mile long, log-lined, 4-6 feet deep.  Not a great looking winter hole, but possible.  Mary wanted to paddle from the back of the canoe with a kayak paddle to give her arthritic shoulder a test and let me fish to my heart's content.  So I fished.  I didn't get the first strike until halfway down the pool, but it was a really nice largemouth, about 17 inches, that hit a spinnerbait.  Then absolutely nothing throughout the rest of the pool.

I won't do a blow by blow of fish I caught, even though it would be a fairly short blow by blow.  That largemouth was the best fish of the day.  Second best was a 15 inch spotted bass.  Third best was a 14 inch smallmouth.  I maybe caught about 15 fish altogether, and only a couple others were over 12 inches.  it wasn't a red letter fishing day.  But there were other compensations.  I spent the day sharing memories of this stretch with Mary, even though we finally remembered that she HAD floated this stretch one time many years ago...

It was back in the days when we were still doing a lot of art shows, trying to sell my paintings and prints.  We'd meet people at the shows, and some would ask about where we lived and we'd tell them.  And a few would ask about stuff like rivers and fishing and then I'd start talking to them a little more.  And once in a while, somehow we'd tell somebody that if they were ever in southeast Missouri to let us know.   Until this episode.  

The couple seemed nice enough.  They bought a framed print as I remember, and seemed interested in floating Ozark rivers.  I don't remember where they were from, but we told them to look us up if they were ever in the Ozarks.  Sometime later, we got a phone call.  They were going to be in our neck of the woods, planned on spending a week, wanted to know if we could take them on some floats.  We agreed.

So the first day after they arrived, I planned to float this section of Big River, because it had been fishing very well and I wanted them to catch some fish.  They assured us that they knew how to handle a canoe, so Mary and I started out in our good canoe, and they were in my old 15 foot Grumman.  The put-in back then was an MDC access about a half mile above the bridge at Blackwell, which was later scrapped.  The reason it was scrapped by MDC was because they'd bought a parcel of land where there was a small creek flowing across the bottom between the road and the river, dug into the bottom in a channel 7 or 8 feet deep, making it virtually impossible to get from the parking lot to the river by staying on the MDC land.  But right next to the parking lot was a rough road on private property going right down to the river, though it still wasn't particularly easy to make it the last few feet of slick, steep mud bank to the water.  So everybody using the access used that old road, which I believe MDC had hoped they could acquire...until the property owner apparently refused to negotiate and told MDC to keep people off it.  Without the use of the road, the access was useless.

That day we used the road to get the canoes into the water and started out, and the couple paddled like they were killing snakes, veering across the river and crashing into the other bank.  Then they veered back across and crashed into the near bank.  And about the third veer, they began to holler at each other.  Mary and I could tell this wasn't going to work.  So we tactfully asked them if they'd like for Mary to paddle the woman and I'd paddle the guy.

As luck would have it, the fishing that day started out terrific.  We were all catching fish.  The woman was catching plenty.  We had told them we released all our fish, and she was willing, but she took the phrase "throw them back" literally.  She'd catch a nice smallmouth, unhook it, and heave it end over end ten or fifteen feet.  Mary finally told her that the idea was to GENTLY release the fish, not see how many backflips she could make them do.

The day went along with no further problems until we got just below the old Vineland bridge (the bridge is long gone but there is still a railroad bridge there, and on Wednesday the pool beneath it was the only place where I actually found a whole school of bass--mostly small ones).  At the time, there was a fast riffle there, with a big sycamore tree leaning out over the fastest part of the riffle.  Mary had never before paddled anybody but me from the back of the canoe, and the lady was absolutely no help whatsoever in paddling.  Mary misjudged the current and got swept under the tree, the woman tried to grab the tree instead of ducking, and the canoe flipped.  The guy and I were right behind, and knowing Mary would have no problem in grabbing the canoe and pulling it toward the bank, we started chasing down floating gear.  The lady ended up clinging to the steep mud bank just downstream, waiting patiently for somebody to come and rescue her.  The guy looked back at her, and said, "Ya know, she's taking all this pretty well, considering she don't know how to swim."  

Of course, that was the first inkling we had that she was a non-swimmer.  The river was up a little, and had we known we would have insisted she wear a life jacket; instead she had never put one on.

We ended up taking them on one other float that week, on Current River, which was also up about two feet.  The poor lady, freaked by her experience on mild-mannered Big River, never lost her death grip on the gunwales of the canoe the whole day on the big, brawling Current.

When Mary and I stopped for lunch, I thought of another set of memories.  In 1975, a buddy and I planned to float this same stretch.  It rained hard the night before, and when we met at daybreak that morning for the half hour drive to the river we were uncertain if it would be in fishing shape, but we'd cross it at Desloge on our way and check it out there.  It looked fine.  So we drove on out to Blackwell, where we'd cross the river on the way to dropping off a vehicle at the take-out.  We clattered across what was then an ancient high iron bridge, and looked down at a solid flow of pure red mud.  I'd never seen the river that muddy.  It wasn't even very high, but it looked solid.  We turned around and headed back to float the river up around Desloge.  That evening, we finally learned that the phenomenon was caused by a barite mine tailings pond dam that had burst, dumping a hundred acres of tailings into Mill Creek just upstream from the Blackwell bridge, which flowed down the creek and into the river, killing nearly every aquatic organism all the way down to the mouth of the Mineral Fork.  

I didn't float that stretch again until two years later, when I did it as the second day of a two day float.  The first day, in unaffected water, I caught over a hundred bass.  That second day, I caught six very small bass.  I didn't float it again for five years, finally getting on it on a nice summer day and catching a LOT of nice fish.  Which gives one a good idea of how long it takes for a river to get back to some semblance of normal after such a tragedy.

I told Mary about my first ever 4 pound smallmouth, caught just upstream of Blackwell when I was 16 years old.  I told her about the first 4 pound class smallie I ever caught at night, which took a Jitterbug in the middle of the long hole below Blackwell.  I told her of trips my brother and I made on this stretch where we caught lots of big fish.  

We came upon an eagle feeding upon the carcass of a ten point buck lying in the water against a gravel bar.  We watched turkeys flying across the river in front of us.  Mary was happy that her shoulder wasn't bothering her.  She was proud that she was handling the canoe so well that I was always in good position to fish.  I was happy she was along...this past year has been scary at times with her medical problems.  So what if the fishing wasn't good.  It was a great day.

 

[Born to Fish]

Sounds like some great memories and some well, not so great!  Thanks for sharing!

 

[Brian Jones]

As good as the fishing on Big River is, I often wonder if it would be any better if not for the years of abuse it suffered as a result of the local mining (both lead and tiff) industries from days gone by.

[Al Agnew]

I've often wondered that as well.  The upper river fishing is about as good as you could possibly expect it to be given the habitat, since the lead mine waste really has an impact on the habitat, both in making much of the river very shallow, with very few deep pools, and in the mine waste smothering the bottom and cutting way down on the biomass of bottom organisms that make up the base of the food chain.  How much better would the fishing be if the habitat was better?

[Smallieguy87]

Last summer i had the privilege of fishing from a private put in near Blackwell bridge to the boat ramp at Washington state Park. It was the second time I had done a float on that stretch and i have to say that's been some of the best fishing I've had on Big river. The first trip produced a lot of numbers and a couple 17' smallmouth. The second time around it rained on us off and on for a couple hours but I managed over 30 smallmouth, 1 crappie, and a largemouth that came in at 19'. A friend of mine managed to do really well that day with a top water storm chug bug and brought in the biggest smallmouth which was right at 18'. I always enjoy reading your posts Al and that kinda took me back on memory lane as well!