Easy going on Maquoketa River

CANTON — For seclusion it would be hard to beat the North Fork of the Maquoketa River in Jackson County.

During a four-hour float a week ago, we saw or heard no one other than ourselves: fly fishing legend Mike Jacobs of Monticello, KCRG-TV9 sports broadcasting legend John Campbell and your correspondent.

Mike, who typically hauls out a backpack full of rubbish during excursions on more popular streams, could not find a single beer can or Styrofoam bait container on our five-mile float from the Ozark bridge to the Caven Bridge Access. No human footprints mingled with the tracks of herons and raccoons on streamside sand and mud deposits.

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With an average fall of 2.6 feet per mile, the 70-foot-wide North Fork flows briskly over a mostly sand bottom through wooded bluffs studded with limestone outcroppings, some of which, over the eons, have toppled into the river.

During this early summer flash drought, I saw few spots that could not be safely waded by an adult — a condition less conducive to large populations of game fish than to wading

The going was as easy as the scenery is pretty. The water was just deep enough to ensure the boats’ pontoons seldom scraped bottom and just swift enough to make paddling almost effortless. No obstructions barred our passage, and well defined Vs between in-stream rocks signaled smooth sailing through the riffles.

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The fishing? Not great but good enough until the brilliant June sun climbed high enough to obliterate all fish-harboring shoreline shade.

With no deeper pools to provide a sense of security, the smallmouth bass went wherever they go when you can’t catch them.

Until then, the pace of the action perfectly matched the leisurely but never dull flow of the river.

Shortly after we launched our kickboats, Mike, who has never forgotten a spot where he’s caught a fish, advised me to cast my mini-buzzbait into a calm, shallow, shaded pocket that did not look all that fishy to me.

My skepticism inched upward with each of my first three fruitless casts but dissolved when a heavy smallmouth slurped my lure from the surface on the fourth.

The fish — which proved to be the day’s largest at 16 inches — mightily resisted capture, providing an exciting start to John’s video recording of the outing.

A little farther downstream, near some of the deepest water we encountered, a pocket with a rock bottom about four feet below the shaded surface, Mike advised me to replace my buzzbait with a lure he calls the bass magnet — a tungsten jig tipped with a plastic minnow.

Though I was not displeased with the buzzbait’s effectiveness, I followed his advice and caught a 15-inch smallmouth on the first cast.

In addition to the approximately 15 smallmouth we caught — most of them at least a foot long — Mike also caught his first gar on a fly rod, a 14-incher that apparently entered the North Fork from the Mississippi River, where they are fairly common.

Though we’d come to catch fish, the overhead sun turned the latter half of our voyage into an appreciation of Iowa’s closest approximation to wilderness — the next best thing to catching lots of fish in an unspoiled natural area.