Coldwater to sam baker.

[Hawg]

Good report

[Al Agnew]

Glad to see the walleye...the St. Francis was once one of the best trophy walleye streams in the Ozarks, but they gradually disappeared after Wappapello was constructed.  It seemed that, other than poachers gigging and snagging them on the spawning riffles, that they may have migrated down into the lake and through the dam during the winter in numbers enough that there weren't enough of them left.  There are also other theories on exactly what happened to them.  At any rate, MDC restocked the river with walleye that came from Black River, presumably the closest genetically to the old St. Francis walleye, two or three decades ago.  But there hasn't been much talk of them in the river since...I get a report now and then that somebody caught one or two, but it certainly isn't well known.

[top_dollar]

12 hours ago, Al Agnew said:

Glad to see the walleye...the St. Francis was once one of the best trophy walleye streams in the Ozarks, but they gradually disappeared after Wappapello was constructed.  It seemed that, other than poachers gigging and snagging them on the spawning riffles, that they may have migrated down into the lake and through the dam during the winter in numbers enough that there weren't enough of them left.  There are also other theories on exactly what happened to them.  At any rate, MDC restocked the river with walleye that came from Black River, presumably the closest genetically to the old St. Francis walleye, two or three decades ago.  But there hasn't been much talk of them in the river since...I get a report now and then that somebody caught one or two, but it certainly isn't well known.

I talked to a local fishing out of a jet boat and he said the same thing as you.  He told me the St. Francis river walleye are Black river walleye.  He said when he gigs he will see schools of walleye occasionally (he specifically said he doesn't gig them), but that they are pretty difficult to catch and actually target.  According to him they are worth targeting on the lower black.  Ill have hit that stretch sometime. 

[Al Agnew]

11 hours ago, top_dollar said:

I talked to a local fishing out of a jet boat and he said the same thing as you.  He told me the St. Francis river walleye are Black river walleye.  He said when he gigs he will see schools of walleye occasionally (he specifically said he doesn't gig them), but that they are pretty difficult to catch and actually target.  According to him they are worth targeting on the lower black.  Ill have hit that stretch sometime. 

Lower Black is where most of my winter walleye fishing was done, back before I stopped doing it in favor of winter smallmouth fishing.  Quite a few people fish lower Black for them in the winter.  Unfortunately, one of the best winter holes is the old gravel dredged hole at the Highway 67 bridge, and it has a nice boat ramp so it's exceedingly easy to fish.  I've spent a lot of time there from November through mid-February  in the past.  My biggest Black River walleye was 31 inches and 12.5 pounds, but I saw several caught that were in the 15-17.5 pound range 40 or more years ago.  The problem is that too many people keep every legal walleye they catch.  The big girls get cropped off before they can reach top end size.

MDC actually live trapped walleye just downstream from Clearwater Dam during spawning season (and by the way, walleye spawning on  Black and Current River starts early; they will have left their wintering holes and moved to the vicinity of spawning riffles by Feb. 20th most years), in order to get the eggs and milt to hatch the walleye they stocked in the St. Francis.  Stocking began in the late 1990s, and has continued sporadically since.

There were a lot of mistakes made in stocking walleye in the Ozarks before genetic studies in the 1990s confirmed that the native river strains were vastly different from the lake strain walleye that were being used for stocking.  All the big Ozark reservoirs had walleye spawning runs up into the streams feeding them when they were first built.  These native river strain walleye were programmed to spawn in river riffles.  They were never really abundant, but they grew huge--Arkansas's state record was a 21.5 pounder that came from Greers Ferry and was caught on one of the forks of the Little Red above the lake during its spawning run.  Missouri's state record has been a 21.1 pounder from Bull Shoals just below Taneycomo Dam in 1988, another river strain fish.  But since the river strain fish were never very common in the reservoirs, lake strain walleye from Michigan and Wisconsin were stocked in most of the lakes.  They spawned in the lake, and outcompeted the river strain fish, so that now you seldom see a double digit walleye in these lakes and the spawning runs up into the streams above are pretty thin.  

That's why it was so important to get pure river strain fish from lower Black River.  As far as I know, walleye are absent from Clearwater Lake; apparently when the lake began to fill the walleye were all downstream.  So now you have pure river strain fish in only the undammed rivers, or rivers downstream from dams.  You can still catch river strain fish from the Spring River, Eleven Point, Current, Black, and Castor rivers, as well as the restocked fish in the St. Francis.

Note that there were river strain walleye in the Osage, Gasconade, and Meramec and their larger tributaries.  But these were not the same genetically, and don't grow as big.  One of my buddies caught the largest one I've ever seen come out of the Meramec a few years ago.  As I remember, it was around 11 pounds.

I could talk about these fish for a long time, they are so interesting.  There used to be good walleye fishing below the most downstream mill dam on Big River, but growing up and extensively fishing Big River upstream from Morse Mill, I never saw a walleye.  Then the mill dams all fell into disrepair and became easily passable (except for one, and it has a fish passage.  About 20 years ago I caught several out of a school of walleye in upper Big River just downstream from Bonne Terre, but I've never caught another one up there.  I've never heard of one being caught on the Meramec above the mouth of the Huzzah, but I suspect they do migrate that far upstream at times.  The Bourbeuse, on the other hand, used to have walleye up to Noser Mill.

Walleye also come out of the Mississippi in the small creeks that run into the river between St. Louis and Cape to spawn.  I've caught juveniles in Establishment Creek up around Bloomsdale, and spent quite a bit of time trying to catch them on Saline Creek, with limited success but there were some in there around spawning season.  But these were not the same river strain...probably closer to Meramec walleye in genetics.  I doubt if there is enough of a run into any of these creeks to make it worth trying to target them anymore.