Fishing An Ozark River

 

Piney River Goggle-eye

         There is a different kind of fishing in April and May in the Ozarks, something that goes back a couple hundred years… grabbing suckers.  It’s a pretty simple thing.  When the suckers are running upstream to spawn, folks just found a nice clean gravel bar and used a white rag and big treble hooks to ‘grab’ the fish we all called yellow suckers.  

         Actually those fish referred to by most Ozarkians as ‘yaller suckers’ are golden redhorse. In the book, Fishes of Missouri by biologist William Pflieger, there are white suckers, blue suckers hog-molly suckers and river redhorse commonly found in sections of the Ozarks.  None of those suckers get much bigger than 3 or 4 pounds but the river redhorse, 70 years ago reached 15 pounds or better quite often.  

         If you don’t know suckers well you might not realize what species you are grabbing, but they all are great eating if you know how to score the fish body, that consists of cutting thru the meat to the backbone every quarter inch or half inch, therefore eliminating the tiny thread-like bones throughout the body.

         If you look out into the river current when the suckers are schooling before the spawn and you have a treble hook out there, you can’t see it very well.   But you can see a white rag tied about 2 feet in front of the hook. When a fish is over the rag, jerk hard and the hook finds it’s mark and the fight is on.

         But while you are grabbing suckers you might be missing some really good rock-bass fishing.  I have always called them goggle-eye and they too spawn in mid April in rocky swift shoals and the pools at the    end of the current.  When I was young, dad and I used little ‘shimmy-flies’, which were made in Salem, Missouri by a fellow named Art Varner.  We would often catch 12 or 15 goggle-eye from one shoal by just letting the spinner flash and keeping the upright hook from turning over.  

         In time, rubber beetle spins became popular for the little fish and the black perch as well. The beetle spin was just a rubber bait duplicating a shimmy-fly.  And with each lure, every now and then, a good-sized smallmouth would attempt to eat it.  Today in river eddies that once had a hundred goggle-eye, I think it is safe to say there are only half as many now.   Limits have been reduced and in many Ozark rivers and the length limit has been set at nine inches. But enforcement of the regulations on goggle-eye is seldom found on the streams.  The scrappy little fish hold their own but I wish I could find them again like they used to be.   Thankfully you can find them though, and it’s good to know that they are hanging in there.

         First time I ever went fishing as a boy was in April.  Dad took me, and one of our old wooden johnboats, on a trip down the upper reaches of the Big Piney River and tried to teach me how to cast an old Shakespeare reel with braided line and a monofilament leader. 

          I was about six years old and I developed a backlash that I was trying to unravel when a scrappy green sunfish (known to dad as a black perch) picked up the little lure we called a “shimmy-fly” and took off with it.  The little fish was only about eight inches long but to me he was a slab-sided frog-eater and the struggle to reel him in was memorable. I will never forget it.  

         I have caught thousands of black perch since then and that’s because they are such a prolific and adaptable little creature that they survive from the muddiest pond in the Ozarks to the biggest lakes we have here.  Every river in the Ozarks has an abundance of them; they often get as big as goggle-eye (rock bass) and as numerous as long-ear sunfish (punkin-seeds). They will sometimes hit a lure as big as they are.  They can do that because they have such a big mouth for such a little fish. They are a member of the sunfish family, which black bass and bluegill are also members.

         But the black perch are good eating too. As a boy who liked to camp, I always had black perch to eat at night when I camped on a gravel bar near some big eddy on the river even if I hadn’t caught a bass all day. They are especially a favorite food for my number one trotlining target, the flathead catfish.  And they weren’t bad eating for me either.

 

To read other articles about fishing and the outdoors go to larrydablemontoutdoors on your computer.  Contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com