Trout Fishing at Maramec Springs Park

Last Saturday I went with one of my friends and his dad to Maramec Springs Park near St. James to do some trout fishing. Meramec Springs park is one of the four trout parks in Missouri, and it is stocked daily from March to October with rainbow trout. You are allowed to keep four trout a day, and you need to purchase a daily trout tag in order to fish. The park is located at the spring of the Meramec river and about a mile of the river. The spring itself is not open to fishing, but the stretch of the river is.

​We left early morning Saturday in order to get there by the time fishing opened at 7.  We bought our tags and were just getting in the water when the siren went off signaling it was time to fish. I started out with a chartreuse hair jig, but soon found it was sinking too fast and getting snagged on the rocky bottom. I switched to a 1/32nd ounce gold trout magnet under a small float. A trout magnet is a small plastic jig on a light jighead. I found a spot at the end of a pool right before a riffle where I spotted several trout rising to the surface. I casted slightly upstream and let my float and jig drift to the fish, making sure to keep my line off the surface of the water for a more natural presentation. Before long I had a hit and reeled in my first rainbow of the day.

After that fish I struggled to hook the fish even though I was getting bites nearly every cast. I decided to set the hook sooner instead of letting the fish eat the jig because they were spitting it out quickly. I then caught 3 fish in quick succession. After they stopped biting on the trout magnet, I switched to a 2inch orange trout worm. I wacky rigged it right down the middle to give it a more natural appearance, and I fished it on the same jighead under a bobber. I caught 2 more fish in the pool, then moved into the riffle itself. The current made it difficult to detect bites using the bobber, so I took it off and caught several more fish that way. After I fished that riffle I didn’t catch many for a while until I found a submerged tree with fish holding on it, and I caught 2 on the trout magnet.

​By then it was about lunchtime, and we stopped to eat our lunches and clean the trout we kept. After lunch the crowd thinned out and a big deep hole that was crowded in the morning was empty. We waded across the river and fished from the far shore. There was a big school of trout, and if you cast to the edge of the school you were likely to get bit. From that one hole I caught at least ten fish, including one long fat trout, one of the biggest I’ve ever caught. All of the fish in this pool were caught on the trout magnet fished without a bobber.

​After a while the bite slowed down and we began to try other spots, but nothing could compare to the previous one. It was about 4:00 and we were tired after a long day of fishing. In total I caught about 20 trout, one of my best days at a trout park. The key was finding schools of fish that were more active than the rest. Fishing under a float helped me to present the bait to the active fish for a longer time. The light jigheads helped me to keep my bait off the bottom and in front of the trout’s mouth longer. I learned a lot from this day of fishing, and I had a lot of fun in the process.

For more information, check out:

http://www.maramecspringpark.com