Upper Iowa River Fishing Report

[JIvers]

I don't have time to fish the Upper Iowa River around Lime Springs or Decorah much anymore, but I did put in a few hours there a couple weeks ago.

The stretch I fish in Howard County has changed due to flooding the last few years, and not for the better: some of the deep holes and runs have filled in with sand, silt, or gravel, and not a lot of new spots have opened up. I am sure there are new spots with great fishing up and down stream from there, but I can't fish those.

I have noticed a decline in the average size of the smallmouth bass ion the Upper Iowa near Granger/Florenceville since the late 1990s/early 2000s, and that trend continued this August. Where I would have caught a bunch of 14" smallies, some 16" smallies, and an 18" or 19" fish or two to round things out, I caught no bronzeback over 12".

Maybe this drop in smallmouth size is due to last year's drought, this year's flooding, a natural cycle, the over-fishing/harvest of big smallmouth some locals back home complain about, some combination of these factors, or just the fact that the stretch of Upper Iowa I have access to has lost some good habitat I do not know, but the quality of the smallie fishing has definitely declined over the last six or seven years.

The Upper Iowa still looks nice, though:

I did catch not one but two quillback, a fish I have never caught out of the Upper Iowa above the dams below Decorah before. One of them was bigger than any of the smallmouth I caught. Unfortunately, I deleted the pictures I took of it by mistake.

[JIvers]

I fished my usual stretch of the Upper Iowa again this weekend, and had pretty much the same results as last year.

All I caught were a few smallies. Only one, a 14", was over ten inches or so. Again, I don't know what happened to the quality of fish on that stretch of river. For that matter, maybe I just picked bad days to fish it two years in a row.

At least the trout fishing north of the Upper Iowa was good.