Fished the MO River for a while last night

In Omaha they have a beautiful riverfront walk and marina, and part of the area is IDEAL for catfishing… a huge eddie right near shore in deep water. So I figured what they hey, I’d give it a try.

Here’s the problem: The river is currently above the highest of the high-water marks on the bridge pylons in the area. Near as I can tell the MO is as high or higher than it’s ever been since they started building concrete bridges in Omaha. At the marina, the water was perfectly even with the top of the walkway and when the only boat down there went to leave it had to hit about 1/3 throttle just to neutralize the current in the river (this thing was a nice inboard runabout, probably about 20′)!

I don’t think I got so much as a nibble, but I will have to go back to that spot and try again. I just wanted to share that MN isn’t the only place suffering from a severe water overrun.

On the drive home I noticed that Blackdog Lake is flooded all the way to the high ground up near Cliff Road at the bast of the bluffs. Wow. A buddy from work who went to college in St. Peter showed me some pics of the MN down there and they’re in really REALLY rough shape.

What a crazy, bizarre year…

Were you fishing a wall? Did you try dropping your bait straight down?

Absolutely. I tried every current break I could find, I tried straight down on 2 different walls, I tried letting the main current pull the bait downstream up against the current break, I tried the slack water in the middle of the marina.

I was without bait when I got there but I found a semi-dessicated but still flexible rotting shad laying on the sidewalk by the water, so I used it progressively in 1/2″ strips from the head back. It was molto stinky.

If there’d been channels there, or if they’d been feeding, I’d have found them, trust me (unless the MO’s bait of choice is something other than the bait whoever was fishing there earlier had been using heh).

I know someone told me most people don’t fish the MO but the Platte instead. The confluence of the Platte and the MO is about 10 miles south of Omaha. The problem with the Platte is that its riverbed is powder-fine sand and it’s mostly too shallow for anything but air boats. Very strange.

The Platte is like that most of its length clear to Wyoming, the upper stretches is trout water.