Lower Mississippi a fishing bonanza waiting to be discovered

Lower Mississippi a fishing bonanza waiting to be discovered

At first you think you are in Tennessee. Then you realize you are in fishing heaven.

CARUTHERSVILLE, Mo.--"Now this is what I have been looking for!" Wade Mansfield exulted as he hauled a pair of wiggling fish into in the bow of his boat. The 3-pound white bass, hooked simultaneously on separate jigs on same line, were his second double of the day, but not his last.

The scene would have seemed strange--if not downright incongruous--to most Missouri anglers. Mansfield's glittering 19-foot fiberglass bass boat, clearly built for speed and sporting a 150 hp motor, was sitting in the middle of a fishing hole 60 yards in diameter and hemmed in by a willow thicket. At one side of the hole, a 6-foot culvert spilled coffee-and-cream colored water into the pool. On either side of the pipe, anglers seated on white plastic buckets were dunking worms and hauling in everything from 15-pound carp to largemouth bass.

As Mansfield continued to work a spot that was barely out of the bank anglers' casting range, he hauled in fish after fish, including several football-shaped largemouth bass and a hefty white crappie. A holiday atmosphere developed, with all the anglers hooting at one another's catches and occasionally rendezvousing bankside to admire one another's fish.

"Girl, what you got in that wire basket?" Mansfield asked one angler, who had been slipping hand-sized fish into her fish keeper for an hour.

"Nothin' but white bass."

"Don't you have to work today?" another of the land-bound crew asked Mansfield.

"I am workin'," the co-owner of the Grizzly Jig Company replied truthfully.

The dialog had the soft accents of western Tennessee. The scenery could have passed for Reelfoot Lake, 20 miles to the northeast. Few Missourians would have guessed this scene was playing out in their home state. Fewer still realize the variety and quality of fishing available on the Mississippi River and its backwater areas in their state's extreme southeast corner.

Mansfield makes it his business to know where the fish are biting on the Mississippi River in Pemiscot County. He admits that exploring such a vast resource can be a daunting challenge.

"I would stack the fishing on the Mississippi up against Lake of the Ozarks, Stockton or Wappapello Lake," he said. "But if you are in an aluminum johnboat, you can't get to all the places you can with a bass boat. Part of the trouble is that there is so much water to cover. Down here, most of our ditches are about the size of the Missouri River."

The scale is hard to grasp at first. The Missouri River's flood plain is visually defined in most places by bluffs a mile or two apart. In southeast Missouri, the Mississippi River is a mile wide, and the edges of its flood plain are out of sight on either side. Within that broad valley are hidden oxbow lakes, sloughs, chutes, bayous and islands, some large enough to have their own lakes.

On this March 8 outing, Mansfield put in at the Boat Club Chute Access northwest of Caruthersville around 8 a.m. and motored about 3 miles upriver. At 30 mph, it was a quick and chilly trip. After rounding an eastward bend in the river, he ducked behind an island and tied up at the "Rock Wall."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built this 20-foot pile of Volkswagen-sized limestone boulders to prevent the river from cutting a new channel across a 2,500-acre bulge of land. The wall holds the river in place, but the size of the rocks permits water to seep through at a surprising rate.

In flood, the river pours over the top of the wall, scouring out a 50-foot-deep hole on the downstream side. When the river is on the rise, as it was on this day, water pours through the wall's crevices, carrying algae, earthworms and other invertebrate animals that draw schools of hungry shad. Following the shad are hungry white bass. At least, that was Mansfield's theory.

The fish fooled him, however. All he caught at "The Wall" was a pair of fat largemouth bass. So Mansfield headed back downriver. Again, the clip was a leisurely 30 mph, since the rising river carried a considerable amount of driftwood.

Re-entering the Boat Club Chute, he bumped the throttle up a bit and skimmed the flat, litter-free water at a brisk 40 mph, going a mile or two up what the untrained observer would assume is a respectable river in its own right. In fact, the 100-yard wide channel is only a side chute of the Mississippi. It dead-ends at 968-acre Gayoso Bend Conservation Area.

In this area, Mansfield boated three or four 1.5-pound white bass around a shallow point between two fingers of deeper water. He wasn't content with this level of action, so he took off back down the chute.

At a spot distinguished by nothing in particular, he cut the throttle to an idle and nosed his sleek boat into a bank-side willow thicket that camouflaged the mouth of a smaller chute parallel to the first one. Threading the pointed bow between flooded saplings, he finally broke into a pool of water surrounding the culvert opening and found what he had been seeking all morning.

Around noon, he found an enchanted 40-foot patch of water, and for an hour he caught and released white bass one after another. Then the action slackened, most likely because all the fish had sore mouths.

Summing up white bass fishing during most of the year, Mansfield said, "You find whites wherever the shad or other bait fish are. That can change overnight, especially when the river is rising or falling."

Late-winter anglers often find whites concentrated in deep holes near the mouths of tributary streams. They are waiting for a pulse of warm water from spring rains to draw them upstream for their annual spawning run.

In the summer, white bass favor places where rushing water picks up oxygen. Such spots include the ends of partially exposed wing dikes and "The Wall." Whites, or as they are known locally, "stripes," also gather behind dikes and in other spots with deep, cool water in the summertime.

Crappie, walleye, sauger, striped bass, hybrid striped bass and flathead catfish often show up in the same places as white bass, since they share a love of bite-sized shad. Oxbow lakes and lakes on river islands also are good crappie spots. Largemouth bass and bluegill sunfish are apt to turn up anywhere out of the river's main current.

Crappie spawn from mid-April to mid-May most years, although high river stages can delay the event. During the spawn, slackwater areas behind wing dikes are excellent places to catch crappie.

Flathead catfish, which reach monstrous proportions in the Father of Waters, love to hang out in root wads and piles of flotsam on the upstream side of wing dikes and other obstructions. They wait in such lairs to pick off passing fish.

Flatheads and the kings of the catfish tribe, blue cats, frequent fast-moving water. Unlike flatheads, blue cats' taste runs toward worms, chicken liver and stinkbait. Trotlines, bank poles and jug lines all yield good catches of catfish, drum and buffalo. Channel catfish share blue cats' taste in foods, but are more likely to be found out of the river's current.

One surprisingly good place to catch catfish is right in the barge-lined lower end of the Boat Club Chute. Starting in August and continuing into winter, spillage of grain being transferred into barges creates a huge food source for hungry fish. Bank fishing around the mouth of the chute can be spectacular during this period.

If you visit Caruthersville to fish the Mississippi, it pays to start your day at The Roundhouse restaurant on Highway 84 near the north edge of town. Take a seat at the round table just inside the door, and you will get a running commentary on current fishing conditions as anglers come and go. They open at 5 a.m. Their biscuits are flaky, their gravy is sinful, and the service is relaxed and friendly.

The Grizzly Jig Company's retail store at 303 Ward Ave. is another excellent source of timely fishing gossip. You may find Mansfield behind the counter, but just as likely you will run into him on the river.

- Jim Low -

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