Meramec River 8/14/2004

Where: Meramac River (Ceadar Ford to Hwy 8 Bridge) Another smallie trip goes down on the Blog. Unfortunately it wasn't a great trip to say the least. There is a reason why the local canoe outfitters do not put in that far upstream. Reason, It's too dang SHALLOW and SLOW. The trip started out with meeting a college buddy and regular fishing partner Faz at my parents home in Rolla. We both arrived at 10:00 pm on Friday night. Faz was courteous enough to purchase a bottle of Crown before arriving. That made for a good night of drinking and made sleeping easier. The plan for Saturday was to float the upper Meramac from Cedar Ford to Hwy 8 Bridge. I thought it would be good smallmouth fishing. Thought was the key word in that sentence because I thought WRONG! I woke at about 7:00 am on Saturday morning. We ran some errands and finally left my house at around 10:00 am. We stopped at the Hwy 8 bridge access and transferred the gear and canoe to Faz's car. We left my truck at the take out. We then drove upstream to Cedar Ford access. We were a bit skeptical about the size of the stream. Little did we know we shouldn't have put in that far upstream. We finally put in at around 11:00 am and proceeded to fish fairly heavily. At around 2:00 pm we realized that we had yet to float two miles. We proceeded to make a little ground. Which turned in to a paddling, canoe getting in/out of Marathon. We must have gotten in and out of the canoe a good fifty times. We did manage to boat three decent smallies during the entire NINE MILES! I vow to never float a stream that small again. We finally got off of the river, which shouldn't even be called a river (more like a stream or drianage ditch), around 6:00 pm. TightLines CanoeFlyGuy