Canoeing in Missouri
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Photo courtesy of Rt. 66 Canoe Rental |
 Photo courtesy of Rt. 66 Canoe Rental |
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Featuring books by Chuck Tryon 200 Missouri Smallmouth Adventures Figuring Out Flies Fly Fishing for Trout in Missouri |
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Check out our new outdoor event calendar! Add your club or organization's own outdoor events. |
Wether it's a crowded weekend, standing on the sand bar watching all the girls go by, or a solitary off season float where you see not another living sole all day, Missouri streams are fun!
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Country View Acres
Campground and Canoe Rental |
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Devil's Elbow, Missouri Serving the Big Piney and Gasconade Rivers 573-336-2730 |
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All photos on this page contain famous Missouri Outdoor people. Missouri Outdoor Communicators annual confrence float trip North Fork of the White River. Dawt Mill
Annual MOC Float 'n' Bloat on the Big Piney. Good Gravel, good grub. No one ever sai hotdogs on a stick are the limit to what you can do on a float trip. |
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Bob Todd bringing up the rear! |
Betty Swihart, patient as usual. |
Trying to fish
the Niangua
by The Accidental Ozarkian, Barbara Baird
originaly published in the St. James Leader-Journal
| By the time Spence Turner had finished advising me as to which worms
and spinners to put on my lure, I had such a big conglomeration on the
end of my line that it made a huge splosh every time I cast it out. I had
a fuchsia-colored jig, along with a spinner and a brown worm on a hook.
And, after following the great outdoor writer’s advice—the one who has
these marvelous fishing trips documented, where he winds up catching and
releasing a boatload of fish—I caught two things: a branch and a huge crawfish.
My husband and I were in a canoe on the Niangua last week as participants in a daytrip activity for outdoor communicators at a conference I was attending at Bennett Spring. I always get a little nervous when I go to these outdoor writers’ conferences, where the other writers (mostly men) put their words into practice. I’m still learning what it’s all about to be functioning in the great outdoors, while trying to catch something to eat at the end of the day. |
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I’ve read a lot of the stuff these guys write about using this or that
bait, and casting under this or that rock. I told Spence (whose byline
has appeared in large and small outdoor magazines all over the country),
“I’m no expert at anything having to do with the great outdoors.” His answer
to me, “Who is?”
So after hearing Spence’s flippant remark, I decided just to sit back, cast my line out occasionally, relax and enjoy the ride on the Niangua River. After a mile or so, my canoe-mate and I happened to float next to a canoe holding two other outdoor writers, Tom and Mark, and Tom’s dog (a strange mixture of poodle and bird dog who had about a thousand cockle-burrs stuck to his fur) named Duke. Tom said, “That worm looks strange on the end of your line. Maybe, instead of sticking the hook through the middle of it, you should just wind it through the head part.” |
“But, Spence already told me to tear the head off to make it shorter and more realistic,” I cried. My husband then got into the act of advising me as to what form my bait should look like, saying, “Well, if you sort of thread the end where the head used to be down over the hook, it’ll look more realistic.” Nothing that sported a pink body with a big black eye, a brown wormy thing attached to it, and a shiny spinning doo-hickey in the middle lookedtoo realistic to me. I mean, it just looked like a foreign object. No wonder no fish wanted to try it. It looked like a piece of pink bubblegum with a chewed-up Tootsie Roll and a piece of aluminum foil stuck to it.
The most confusing thing to me, though, was when I heard contradictions from the experts as to whether or not the Niangua would be a good river to fish that day. One expert, Walter—who guides fishing trips in Yellowstone Park—said the river had too many people on it to be much good for fishing. Meanwhile, Tom said he personally thinks the fish don’t mind if folks are banging on canoes and singing at the tops of their lungs. In fact, Tom started singing, too, and so we followed the balladeer of the river for the next couple of miles. First he sang lounge songs, like “Feelings,” and then, he shifted over to words he made up to the Salsa Reggae music coming from a boom box at a nearby campground. The last set of songs I heard before he and Mark floated out of earshot (I think that’s when I hookeda log in the water, and we had to go back) consisted of Irish ballads. Later, that evening at the fish fry, he told me that he had also sung a set of Frank Sinatra songs. Gosh, I’m sorry I missed that—somehow hearing “Strangers in the Night” on the Niangua would have made my day.
The Niangua, though, with or without its fish, is one of the most beautiful rivers I have ever floated. Fishermen love it because it’s supposedly loaded with Brown and Rainbow trout, smallmouth bass, suckers and goggle eye. It’s low this year, and what river isn’t? But, if you can spare a day away—during the week unless you like to float with masses of people—go. Canoe outfitters have sprung up everywhere around Bennett Spring. It wouldn’t be hard to find a canoe for rent this time of year. In fact, you might want to wait a couple of weeks when the colors are at their peak. Just get out there and enjoy the day. But if you catch a smallmouth, let me know what you used!
by The Accidental Ozarkian, Barbara Baird
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