Bagnell Dam

I have no experience in the area. But if I had to hazard a guess as to how to catch some, I would hurl a line with a heavy weight far in front of them, with a worm/crawfish for drum, or a minnow for buffalo. Beforehand, chum the area, get 'em in a feeding mood. Again, I've never fished missouri, so take my words as just a possible solution. I have no idea what I'm doing.

Hi Brad,

I found out from one of my fellow anglers that big drum like to eat crustaceans. He showed me how to use shrimp instead of nightcrawlers and the big ones just can't seem to resist! Bottom rig your pole with a large weight, 2 to 4 oz. I have been at Bagnell and know there are a lot of snags, so instead of the traditional sliding weight above a barrel swivel, you can use a setup like this: use a 3 way swivel with one leader going to a weight and the other going to your hook. Make the leader going to the weight out of line that is several pounds lighter test than your main line or the leader that goes to the hook. This way if the weight snags in the rocks it will break off without you losing your hook - most importantly if you have a fish on and the weight gets snagged, you won't break everything off and leave a big fish trapped on the bottom of the river.  Make the leader to the weight relatively short and the leader to your hook a bit longer than that, to try to keep the hook away from the weight. They may get twisted in the current but it should still work ok.  Take a circle hook, like a #4 or #2, and hook shrimp onto it right through its shell. Now toss all of this out and set your pole in your pole holder and wait for the magic to begin. We found that using shrimp generally keeps the small drum away but increases the amount of big ones you will find. Who knows, out there maybe you will score a blue catfish or big channel cat off of it too! 

As far as the buffalo go, I am not as knowledgeable in that area as others on this site might be. My buffalo have mostly come out of specific situations where I know they are feeding and can either trick them into hitting a jig or sight fish a waxworm to ones that cloop at the surface, and I have only caught bigmouth buffalo - I have yet to land my first smallmouth or black buffalo. On our latest trip into Illinois, some of the bigmouth buffalo we caught displayed bizzare behavior, hitting bait on bottom that was anything from nightcrawlers to cut bait....

Good luck out there! The one time I was at Bagnell, the flow was non-existent and I basically got skunked.