The Lamine River just west of Columbia, MO is a river that one crosses on the way from St. Louis to Kansas City. I have been eyeballing this river for years and years, and I finally had an opportunity to spend a couple of hours on it last week.
The water quality, in my opinion, is fairly poor. It is very common of rivers in the northern part of Missouri- true mud bottoms, slow flow, and due to the proximity to flowing into the Missouri River, chock full of rough fish. I do not think I have ever seen that many gar in one body of water- they literally were swimming around like sharks! There were parts of the river that had a green algae like film, which are typical of bodies of water that have an issue with farm run off chemicals, etc.
I ended up kayaking about 4 miles total. Heading up stream to one of the bridges (fishing for bass the whole way) and then turning around and coming back. I also went down river just a bit to see the confluence point of the Blackwater River. One of the more interesting highlights was about a 5 pound Asian carp literally jumped from one side of my kayak to the other side of the kayak.
This is a river I will probably not come back to fish (although it probably has some very large catfish in it), however it would be a great river to get the touring kayak out and go for some miles in the winter- very few people appear to use this river- probably due to the way the river lays out and possibly the water quality.
"Life is better on a kayak"
Mike
click HERE for a water trail map of this adventure
