Craig and I headed down to Blue Spring Creek, near Bourbon this morning. Neither of us had fished this water before, and after reading all the posts about it in the recent past — we had to go see for ourselves. We left St. Louis at 6am and were on the water fishing by 7am. We started down at the access directly across from Blue Springs Resort, and walked/fished down to the mouth of Blue Springs with the Meramec. We thought we would just hike down there and then walk the road back to the truck. Basically just getting a look at the lower water. That is one curvy little creek — imagine our surprise when we hit the Meramec and weren’t in sight of the boat ramp or road (actually it was a 100 yards or so upstream, but we didn’t want to wade up to it); so back up the creek we went. There weren’t too many fishy looking holes in that stretch of water (there were some, but not a bunch). Not a single fish spotted in that section of water.
We then headed up to the lowwater bridge directly up the road an fished there. We fished upstream quite aways. I didn’t see a fish, but the water was thinner and it looked like it could hold more fish. I stopped to fish a pretty deep run and Craig continued up past the second low-water bridge/driveway up to where the creek splits. He did see a couple of fish up there. Again, I didn’t have any luck. So I started to hike back to the truck. As I was walking back, Mike reached me on my FRS radio (he was on NN near the Meremac River and I could hear him transmitting) and we met up at where we were parked. Then the most interesting part of the day for me occurred. Mike pulled out his kick net and we went to go look at the bugs in the stream (we seined directly below the low- water bridge below the manmade rock dam). There was food all over the place — little green caddis larva, little orange caddis larva, helgramites, mayflies, crawdads, minnows, scuds (although not many), and some really big grub looking things (they had the color of the hellgrammite but were allot fatter — didn’t know if it could have been a stage of that insect or not — it really looked like a grub or caterpillar and was allot fatter than the crane fly larva that we got from SpringRise). That was pretty cool — Mike took some photos.
After talking with Mike for awhile, Craig and I decided to drive up to the highway and park there (where thickety ford road and NN meet) and fish upstream. We spotted two trout that were approximately 10″ long in the hole that is in front of the house and in sight of the Hwy (Mike later verified that he had seen the same fish). We couldn’t get them to take, so we fished all the way up to the next access point (it is the access with the plastic flowers) and only found a couple of really fishy holes. Craig and I each caught a chub and that was it for fish action. The holes that looked like there should be fish, we didn’t even appear to spook them (although they could have been gone by the time we got there). Once we got to that access we decided to head back to the truck and get on the road.
This was my second small creek fly fishing excursion (the first one was Mill Creek on New Year’s Day of 2003), and i don’t know that I will be ready for another one anytime soon. I think I may prefer the bigger waters than the smaller confined waters. Although, we didn’t see another angler all day on the stream and the scenery was great — so it was still a great day to be on the water. I know Mike caught two trout, he has pictures to prove it, which I guess gives us hope that Blue Springs Creek will rebound. — Matt Tucker