The plastic grub...

I river fish sixty or seventy days a year most years(sometimes twice that) and you won't ever catch me on the water without a three inch plastic grub. If I'm wading and not carrying alot of tackle I might only have a couple colors but one will be smoke metalflake. It just looks so much like a generic minnow in the water with just the right amount of flash and I have caught so many fish with it over the years that I just have alot of confidence in throwing it. I'm also pretty big on the various orangish brown combinations out there because I feel like they look alot like many of the darters and sculpins in the river and bounced along the bottom make an okay crawfish imitation. You can find a plastic grub in almost every color you might imagine and then some. It seems I have owned most of them at one time or another and you wanna know a secret? Most of them catch fish. I guess I'm a presentation first, color second, kind of a guy. However, I'm also certain some colors more than others will improve your chances of catching catching a fish while fishing grubs. Smoke metalflake, motor oil, and clear metalflake are good colors in clear water and on sunny days, especially in the later part of spring and most of fall. These guys closely resemble those of baitfish. Try some grubs grubs in translucent (somewhat clear allowing light to pass through) colors that also include some gold or silver flakes in them. This will add a little flash to their action when the sun is bright. On overcast days metal flakes will lose alot of their flash. I was given some gawd awful pearl gold grubs with gold flakes in them. So ugly they made your eyes hurt, but they catch fish and I use the things all the time. I also find I throw these alot more when I'm fishing by myself and no one is looking but that probably says more about me than the grub. Pumpkin Seed, red or any combination of green, orange, brown and yellow will work to imitate the colors of crawfish. Try and determine the color of the craws in the water you're fishing and go with the closest color to that. I like the grubs that are two toned with one side being orange and the other brown too for the same reason. Chartreuse is an awesome color when you're trying to catch smallmouth bass. Why? I haven't a clue. Chartreuse metalflake is probably the first color I'd buy after smoke metalflake when starting to fish with these things. I realise that flies in the face of the time honored tradition of trying to find out what the fish are feeding on and imitating it. Just remember bass fishing also has an equally time honored tradition of the googly eyed red and white striped creature lure from outer space catching fish. Look at how flyfisherman go about it. Trout fishing they count every leg and appendage on whatever they are imitating. Put the same guy on a smallmouth river and he will be catching fishing on a pink and orange deer hair bug with a yellow tail. I like to think rather than bass being dumber than trout it means they are smart enough to look at that and reason that "hey I've never seen one but its alive". And being the mean cantakerous bastards they are then try and eat it. A chartreuse grub is just the essence of that boiled down wedded to the deadliest river fishing lure there is. And plastic grubs are dirt cheap, something to consider in todays world of ten dollar crankbaits. Live a little and experiment you just might find a color that produces for you and which can be your own little secret. Just make sure you have some smoke metalflake grubs in your river box too okay? Trust me on that. Most of the time I fish a grub on a plain roundball jighead either a 1/8th ounce or 1/4 depending on the depth and current speed. If I find fish feeding in a run but not on the bottom (white bass alot, sometimes smallies) I'll go to a lighter weight to let the grub swim down the run on a tightline rather than hug the bottom.
I also think sauger, in contrast to most other fish, actually like a bit of resistance when they hit and If I'm catching more sauger than bass I'll fish a quarter ounce jighead. Ill also go heavier in swifter deep water like say below a lowhead dam. I think you almost have to work at fishing a grub wrong, just chucking it out and reeling it in will produce some fish tho most time I try to swim it slowly just off the bottom or let it sweep thru a run on a tightline, again just off the bottom. In slower water like a hole or around a bridge abutment I'll sometimes tightline the grub to the bottom and bring it back in a series of lifts or slow sweeps. This is also a good way to pick up a nice channelcat or two also. Some of the nicest channels I've caught have been on grubs. It certainly wakes you up to be smallmouth fishing and tighten up on a ten pound catfish! That is one of the grubs main strengths, in a river like the Little Miami you might catch any of seven or eight different species of fish on one on any given trip.

Introduction to the river.

My little story is not meant to be an exact cast here, throw that, fishing guide to the Little Miami. Instead it's more the ramblings of a guy who has grown up around the river and seen most of it in a lifetime of fishing. There are individual sections on some of my favorite areas and a little background on each with a few fishing stories thrown in. Most of the people in the old photos are either relatives of mine or places they worked or knew on the river. Again this is not a dry history from a textbook but more along the lines of local lore and legend. And while I've tried to be as accurate as possible don't take me as the gospel on these things. After all, it is just possible that the Loveland Frog, the Shawnahooc or “River Demon” might not exist. One nice thing about fishing the river is that you don't need a twenty thousand dollar bass boat and thousands more in equipment to have a quality experience. Steal your kids book bag, throw inside a peanut butter sandwich, a water bottle, and a small box of lures, grab a spinning rod and your all set. Do put on some old tennis shoes that you won't mind getting wet. After all, that is probably the best way to experience the river, wading wet on a hot summer's day. As for lures you don't need thousands, while the rivers bass may be picky according to size or presentation a dozen or so lures will cover just about every situation. In my river box I carry eighth ounce jig heads and smoke metal flake grubs, inline spinners like the Roostertail in mostly shades of white or silver, the smallest size of floating rapala, a tiny torpedo topwater plug, and an assortment of small crankbaits. My selection for the flyrod leans heavily towards topwater bugs made out of deerhair because they are so much fun and catch fish. A more practical selection would lean more towards clouser minnows and crayfish imitations. As far as live bait goes, the Little Miami is a river's river and abounds with fish that will jump on a nightcrawler or live crayfish. In fact a hellgramite or small crayfish might just be the best option for smallmouth on the river too. That's one of the nice things about the river. Not only is it perfect for classic flyrod fishing where you can get as fancy as you want and spend more on a flyrod than you might on a decent used car but the river is also ideal for just getting away and relaxing and fishing it the way Huck Finn might have. Wading in old jeans and catching channel cats and drum on worms. A day on the Little Miami is a step back in time to the way fishing used to be, when the object was to get away and enjoy yourself. If you look around you will also find yourself seeing things that you had no idea existed here in today's rushed world. Turtles digging nests in the sand, eagles flying overhead, a deer coming down to the river at dusk. Try it, you just might like it...

Reading the water...

Here we have a drawing of a productive stretch of river. Water quickens as a hole shallows and pours over a riffle that deepens into a run before the river deepens again into another pool. Long slow pools in the Little Miami typically have a soft bottom that does not provide much food for either bass or catfish. Often they run waist deep for hundreds of yards and when the water is clear you can see that are devoid of both cover and fish. But as the water speeds up at the tail of a pool the bottom becomes hard, mostly a mixture of smaller gravel and rock while the riffle/run below has bigger rocks mixed in. This area of hard bottom can run deceptively far up into the pool unseen from above the water, but as soon as the bottom begins to harden it can hold fish. Often the faster water in the tail becomes smooth as it shallows and is known as a slick. In spring, after the water is sufficiently warm enough for smallmouth to be active, all through fall, the tail of pools are the most consistent fish producing spots on the river. I usually start out with an inline spinner cast cross current and quartering upstream, fan casting my way across the tail. An inline spinner's blades will not turn correctly if cast directly upstream so be sure and cast both accross stream and upstream. If the tail has a slick, a topwater twitched as it sweeps downstream can be exciting as can a deerhair bug fished with a flyrod. Be sure to throw a few casts up further into the hole in case the current has swept away the muck further up into the hole than it looks. The tail of a big pool is a place that I will often stop and fish again walking out at the end of a fishing trip as fish drop back out of a pool and begin to feed replacing those you might have hooked earlier. Some of the best spots on the river, the destination spots, have a distinct tail/riffle/run/pool transition from onr pool to the next. These spots are also the food factories in the river. hellgrammites, caddisflies, snails, baitfish, and crayfish abound. The run or head of the pool is also prefered habitat for small mussels. If deep holes and pools are the living rooms and bedrooms of the stream basses world, think of the riffle and run as his kitchen and dining room. The run or deep end of a riffle is also a good place to search for feeding sauger, white bass, and channel cats. The water depth and speed can vary greatly over the length of a riffle/run and you can end up throwing half the lures in your box in one hundred yard stretch. Don't be afraid to keep switching lures here as conditions dictate. Our drawing also shows a shallow backwater. These are often small fry nurseries and are filled with tiny fish seeking safety in the shallows. Very late in the day or at first light can find bass patrolling the deeper edges of these backwaters. Deeper backwaters can also be a fun place to throw a dry fly for pumpkinseeds and other panfish. At the bottom of runs weedbeds often begin, holes or breaks in these can hold bass but they are mostly one fish spots.



In the next drawing we see a smaller stream entering the main river flow. In flood these streams spew rocks out into the river and create their own rock bar and/or riffle in the Little Miami. These act just like the riffles between the pools in the river, speeding up the water flow and creating a hard bottom and another food factory. These are great place to throw either a grub or jig, letting it sweep downstream in the current off the end of the bar and into the bar's eddy. The water above the bar becomes in essense a miniature tail not unlike the tail of a pool and should be fished accordingly. As the water sweeps around the rock bar at the incoming creeks mouth it often creates a seam where fast water flows past slow water. This seam can extend for quite a ways downstream holding fish. Here a fish can hold in slower water and dart out and catch food as it passes by. Here you also often see gar holding in clear water.



In the third picture we have a bend in the river. Usually you can only fish such places from the shallow inside of the bend with the far bank being to steep to fish from. Very early and late in the day you can sometimes find bass herding minnows up on the shallow gravel of inside bends. If you cast ahead of these swirls with a small rapala or inline spinner you allmost always are rewarded with a jolting strike. The outside of river bends are typically the deepest spots in the river as the current hits here full force in flood, scouring out a hole. If there is any flooded timber in the hole, here is where you want to try and catch that big shovelhead. The now defunct railroad ofen dumped huge amounts of stone and riprap along outside bends to controll erosion. Here, with both current and cover, bass and catfish find good hunting so the fishings often great. The best example of this kind of cover is the "Big Rocks" just upstream from South Lebanon. These kind of spots, like distinct riffles/runs, are destination spots that you plan a fishing trip around. A plastic grub might just be the best lure choice here but plan on losing a bunch of them to the rocks.

Of course there a million other kinds of fish holding spots in the river besides the ones listed above. Bridge abutments, holes or cover in a pool etc., but they all usually have one thing in common, except in winter, when they congregate in deep pools, gamefish in the river prefer rock or gravel to a mucky bottom. Find that with some moderately deep water nearby and odds are you will find fish.

The Snake...Roxanna and Spring Valley

So you've walked all the way down to fishpot ford, bushwacked back up to the truck, then a week or two later maybe you found the old kings dam in the thickets below the old junction. You might have even sniffed out a riffle or a hole or two that it seems like only you know about. Your starting to think you know the river about as good as anybody. But there's those pesky rumors, your buddy that can't fish a lick, but who is one of those hard core macho kayaker dudes, tells you about the place where the river bent hard back on itself then back the other way again and again till he wasn't quite sure which way was east or west anymore. You ask where and he seems vague, mutters something about no roads and strainers and changes the subject. Six months go by and you overhear some guy's nightmare canoe story, how they ended up coming out after dark and how the river twisted and turned just like in the kayaker's story. There's no place like that on the Little Miami right? Idly you ask where he took out at and later with a little help from google maps your looking at this...





Welcome to "The Snake". So how do you get there? It sits a mile or so above the road at Spring Valley Wildlife Area's unknown little access ramp. Right behind that old gravel pit, you know the one with so many no trespassing signs your not sure if they would have you arrested if they caught you cutting thru or just shoot you. You could walk the riverbank, well, I've done that but it's decidedly unrecommended. In early, early spring maybe but later it's three quarters of a mile of head high stinging nettles that felt more like three hundred miles by the time my itching beat up body finally stumbled out of the nettles and straight out to just sit in the river and cool off. Hmmm, so can't you just park over there by those big tanks on 42 and bushwack across that field and hit the river on the other side? Well a drive by shows a tall chain link fence topped by barbed wire. Ok, so you will just walk up the bike trail a mile or so and cut back down the riverbank, won't that work? Well theres more no trespass signs and more of those d#@n nettles. A canoe seems the most practical way to get in but then you have to stop and beach the thing 12 or 15 times to even begin to fish half of the spots you want to because you pull it up on a bar to fish and fifty yards later there is another gravel bar to fish and then fifty yards another and another below that and on and on. It's not like further downriver where a spot screams "fish right here". Instead there is one pretty good looking spot that should hold a fish or two after another all the way thru. I've been there a half dozen times or so and haven't even started to learn the place yet.















I can tell you there is alot of sand and gravel bars made out of smaller stuff than downriver. The rocks are closer to marble size than fist sized and the bars run way out into the river and they seem to move around a bit everytime I go. If I'm in the gorge below South Lebanon and I find a rock bar I know there is a good chance it was there in my father's day, up here I'm not sure if it was there before the last storm.







There is a lot of fish here though. And if you like the flyrod bring it, although the rivers a third of its size down at say Fosters, all those rock bars give you room to backcast and here the rivers full of strainers and stumps that hold rockbass, if the smallies don't cooperate, that willingly bop a fly. However you manage to get in, (parachute maybe?) bring bug spray, lunch (it's gonna take awhile), and wear jeans to try and protect yourself from the nettle jungle. Or better yet believe me when I say the fish are bigger downstream, the wadings easier, the access is easier, and just put the snake on that list of places your going to fish "someday" and leave it to the crazy people.






Downstream of the snake the river flows thru the Spring Valley Wildlife Area. Theres a nice little access road that seems known only to the dove hunters that hit the sunflower fields in the fall. But between the sunflower fields and the river sits a classic riverbottom thats has some majestic trees. You can find big sycamores scattered all up and down the length of the river but theres a grove of real giants here.












Further downstream the river flows by the marsh in Spring Valley Wildlife Area, one of the best birdwatching spots in the state if not the whole eastern US. More than 230 species have been seen here. Yep that's not a typo, 230, alot of states haven't even listed that many in the whole state. The marsh also holds beaver, otters, deer, muskrats galore, and decent fishing for panfish and largemouth bass. Theres a nice trail around the marsh and a long boardwalk runs out into the cattails at the upper end.















It's high on my list of places to critter watch and just explore, with everything from baldcypress trees in the water to overgrown fields and upland woods. The river here has a few bass holding riffles, some long pools, and lots of wood and trees in the water. I can usually count on having the water to myself and like to just kick back here and catch some channels and drum on nightcrawlers and enjoy the quiet.

Magrish River Lands Preserve

If your roaring across the Little Miami on Kellogg Avenue and see the sign for Salem Road take it. Down around the looping exit ramp and you turn into the Magrish River Lands Preserve, less than a minute away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. Magrish itself is only a 45-acre park but it butts up against California Woods on one side and the opposite river bank belongs the best I can tell to Lunken Airport. The river flows under the Kellogg Avenue bridge and out to the Ohio River. Here sits a giant marina busy with boat traffic from the giant Ohio River but upstream of that sits Magrish and quiet, quiet, quiet. Well almost, just when you think your way upstream somewhere away from the big city here comes a plane from nearby Lunken Airport buzzing overhead. The airport makes up for that though (almost) by helping keep Magrish a little bit isolated and off the beaten path. You might share the place with a lone birdwatcher but your just as likely, during the week at least, to have the place completely to yourself. And there's somehow alot of empty space to have completely to yourself, for a long ways upstream there is nothing in the floodplain even though your in the city. Up river a bit towards state route 125 I caught the largest fish I've ever caught out of the Little Miami, a huge carp I guesstimated at somewhere between thirty five and forty pounds. People that live here and fish the river daily tell me that the fish seem to wander in and out of the Ohio. This makes for quite a bit of mystery, one day the river here is full of fish, the next seemingly empty. But this also makes for a great diversity of fish too with white bass schooling one day and something different like hybrid stripers the next.
The history of this place is really the history of Cincinnati itself for the cities original settler, Benjamin Stites, settled here on 20,000 acres. Stites owned the riverbank from the rivers mouth to upstream of present day Lynken Airport. Benjamin Stites was a trader who seemed to buy and sell a bit of everything when a band of Shawnee stole his horses and some goods near Washington, Kentucky. A party set off to try and recover them and followed the Shawnee across the Ohio and up the Little Miami. Supposedly Stites was so taken by the beauty of the Little Miami river valley that he decided then and there that he would someday settle here. He helped persuade John Cleves Symmes, a New Jersey congressman to purchase territory between the Miamis from the federal government, divide it into parcels, and sell the land to settlers such as himself. In 1787, Symmes contracted with the United States Treasury Board to buy one million acres of the region. Symmes’s first buyer was, of course, Stites. And the rest, as they say, is history. Being subject to floods of both the Ohio and Little Miami rivers has kept this little island of peace possible as the great city of Cincinnati has grown up all around it.

Armleder Park

Over the hill from Ault Park and just off route 125 and east of downtown is another jewel in the Hamilton county park system, Otto Armleder Memorial Park. Over three hundred acres of soccer fields, dog parks,and rollerblading trails hide the fact that the whole backside of the park straddles the Little Miami River. And not just any stretch of river but a very interesting one containing a number of bends, riffles, and the biggest rock bars on the river. Unfortunately the proximity of the dogpark means there seems to always be a labrador retriever splashing up and down the riverbank. But get there early in the morning before people come pouring into the park and enjoy some of the best fishing in the whole river for that piscatorial dinosaur, the gar. Armleders extensive shallows with a rock instead of muddy bottom are prime territory to catch one of these scary monsters. That long bony bill filled with sharp teeth makes gar very hard to hook with conventional techniques. I use medium spinning tackle and cut bait. The trick is to cut the bait into a one inch square and use a small hook. Use just enough weight to keep the bait in place or even none if possible. The bait is cast out and the bail left open and the line secured by a tiny rock so the gar can pick up the bait and run with it. Typically the fish will take off on a lightning fast run and you need to wait. And wait, and wait, its allmost impossible to wait too long to strike when gar fishing. You want the fish to swallow the bait as its nearly impossible to land one otherwise.
They are strong and able fighters and I've had them jump completely out of the water during the battle. By the way don't use a stainless steel hook as you are just going to cut the line to release the fish. The enzymes inside the gars stomach will disolve the hook rather quickly. Allmost any fish you catch of whatever species that is hooked deeply has a much much higher chance of surviving if you cut the line than try to rip the hook out. Armleder has some wide very shallow stretches that are not great fish holding spots but the bends have some places that hold all the major fish species in the river. Theres also a very nice little known canoe launch that will let you explore more of the river too. The huge gravel and rock bars make Armleder a super destination spot in the spring and late summer when wading birds are migrating thru. Theres a nice shaded trail that follows the riverbank that allmost lets you think you are in wilder country too that offers fine river views to the fisherman or birder.