The morning started out horribly. I ended up waking up around 6am to use the bathroom and wondering why the sun is up. Why the hell didn't I wake up to my alarm on my phone at 4:30am when I was planning on going with my brother and dad to the Mazon. So I go hunting for my phone in the bedroom. Turns out someone called me the night before and because I have my phone on ring/vibrate it does both and vibrated off the bedside table and was under the bed. I immediately checked and just as I thought. Eight missed calls, one voicemail, all my brother and dad LOL. So I call them, they say they been out on the Mazon for about 20 mins, some creek chubs, no smallies. I get dressed real quick, grab my gear, grab a pack of smokes and an Arizona Green Tea at the gas station and I'm on my way. I arrived about 7:30am. We fished out in the Coal City area. We worked two different sections of the river, one too deep to wade, but we picked things apart from shore for a short while landing probably 15-20 smallies and a couple rockies. Smallies all went in the 8-12in. range, but beautiful colors. All caught on jigs/twisties of varying weights/colors. Mostly 1/8th and 1/16th oz jigs and color didn't seem to much matter.

Here's some pics from us following a creek-bed down to the river at our first spot. This little walk was beautiful and there were many amazing rocks and formations in the bed of this small creek.

My dad posing for my camera while we wander the creek-bed down towards the river.


Some shots of some of the rocks in this winding little creek-bed. There were some cool things here. We actually took a rock home that had a hollow out of it like there was a fossil of some sort in there at one point. It's in my trunk, no pic of it, but I'll try to get one up.



My brother and dad unknowingly posing for my camera while my brother takes a random pic


My dad unknowingly posing again


My brother with right around our average size smallie for the morning at the first spot we hit.


Me with a fatty rock-bass.


These are just some of the shots of the cliffs/bluffs and a bridge at our first spot. These areas are absolutely beautiful to look at. There were also a TON of dragon/damsel flies all over the bluff walls that looked like they were just moving from a larvae to an adult state, they kept landing on us as we walked past these bluff walls.






My brother playing with his rod as usual


Here's a cool little spider I spotted eating his breakfast up on one of the bluff walls as we walked past. Thought he was cool and even cooler that I got to see him enjoy his morning meal as much as I tend to. (the meal is just below the spider out of the camera-shot, though.


We then decided to switch to a different spot along the river. This area was much more wader-friendly with nice flats and deep pools, some waterfalls, lots of rocks and bluffs and cliff walls creating many little eddies to pull fish out of. The area was absolutely gorgeous on a great morning to be out wading the river It was late in the day (around noon) and we only managed 5 or 6 smallies in this spot, but this will be the area we are going to hit from now on. We barely got to work this area, probably 200sq. feet is about all we worked and we wanna work many miles both up and down river from here.

Some of the bluffs at the second spot.





My brother becomes an unknowing victim of my camera again lol.


This waterfall is just a feeder-creek that we walked through to get to the main river, but it made for nice scenery!


Here's another shot from up on top of the hill. If you look just down-river from the waterfall you can see the first set of ripples that run all the way across the river where there were a bunch of rocks. We picked up a few in this area where there was a nice 4-5ft. deep hole. That was also the furthest we worked down river and we didn't work up-river at all. Next time we'll be working 2-3 miles down-river which curves around that bend at the left in front of the bluff wall in this pic.


Again, here's the ripple that served as the furthest down-river we went. It was like 2pm, we were all tired, I had been out there for about 7 1/2 hours on 3 hours of sleep and my dad and brother were out there for around 10 hours and they hadn't even slept Sunday night. You can also see the bluff wall all the way down at the end where the river bends to the left a bit better in this pic.


And another up on top of the waterfall.


All in all it was a wonderful trip and a beautiful way to finish the day off with the bad start to my morning. This was our first trip to the Mazon and we're looking forward to doing it some more. It was more of an exploratory trip and now that we know the waters we want to work a little bit we can hit it a little harder next time We'll probably be out Wednesday morning to this same spot if anyone is interested in joining us. Ken perhaps? Anyways, Good luck and good fishing everyone!!! Oh and I'll have more pics of fish next time I was so busy getting scenery and everything else to document our little excursion, and we were so busy exploring that we only snapped a couple pics of a couple fish. I'll make sure to get more fish pics next time

Nice report man:)

Cute little river.

Loads of fossils in the creek bed. My old math teacher from high school used to go there all the time.

Ya, after doing some research on it, I'll quote Wikipedia as saying "The Mazon River is associated with the Mazon Creek fossils of the Francis Creek Shale, which are also exposed in strip mines and quarries near the River. This fossil bed includes well-preserved fossils from the Pennsylvanian period of the Paleozoic era and is a world-famous Lagerstätten site."

10 or so years ago I walked all over the Mazonia lakes and then explored the Mazon that runs right next to it. Haven't been back there in that long.

You guys must have been closer to the Illinois because it sure doesn't look like that. Wide variety of fish and got my one and only Warmouth in Illinois.

In my collection of maps I have all the 17X22 inch topo maps of the whole river.

It became one of those things of why travel that far. But for you south side boys it could be more worth it.

I do remember being a couple of bridges down from Mazonia and snagging in the ass the biggest soft shell turtle I've ever seen. Nothing puts up a better fight than that.

We'll have to see how it ends up looking farther up and down river from where we were. From what we saw, it looks excellent. Rock bottom everywhere we waded, some shelf rock, some boulders, some gravel, but all rock. No sinking in the mud or messing around with sand/clay bottoms. Good wading riverbed for sure.

We saw a couple of locals out there. One had a small, one man bass hunter boat(in the deep stretch we mentioned), and he said he has caught probably 20 different species of fish out of the river. All of them get quite large as well. He was going out bowfishing for gar, apparently. All he had on the boat was a bowfishing bow. I snagged something in the river, and it popped loose after 10 seconds or so, and all I came back with was a fish scale the size of a quarter... No clue what that could have been... but if the scale was any indication, it was huge. Maybe the gar? Dunno.

There was a couple fishing near that little waterfall when we first arrived. That waterfall you see, appears to be modified by some means. The bed of the creek for about 50 feet upstream of where it dumps into the river, is some kind of man-made material. I'm not sure what the material is, maybe fiberglass or something, but I assume they did that to redirect the creek to build the road. Maybe they did it to keep it from eroding too much during high water? Not sure, but it was definitely not natural. The couple had a few 5-6 lb. channel cats on a stringer for dinner, and told us that they've caught channel cats upwards of 20 lbs. out of the river, but preferred the smaller ones for eating. Well, obviously. The local gentleman also mentioned that a friend of his has pulled 5 lb. smallmouth out of the river on several occassions on crankbaits and shad-raps.

We'll give you guys some more information as we explore a bit more, but at first glance, it appears to be a jewel of a river that has somehow flown under most fishermen's radar.

P.S. It is actually farther from us than it is from you, but we really have no quality fishing near us, so we're driving about an hour wherever we go. It's around a 50 mile drive, but it's all non-toll highway miles for us.

Didn't we plan on hittin this place up Matt??

Vermillion.

I'd be down for that.

Ed79 wrote:. . . it appears to be a jewel of a river that has somehow flown under most fishermen's radar.

Only to you youngsters. Remember, there were people standing on the beach to greet Christopher Columbus.

You may want to consider the Little Vermillion on the other side of the Illinois. Have had this on my radar since out playing on the Mazon years ago. Know a guy that fished it. He liked it better than it's south of the Illinois cousin.

Check this out.

http://www.riverfacts.com/rivers/11166.html

Scroll down and you'll find a link to a map with access points.

Once upon a time I had all the time in the world, now I just have all the information.

This weekend I'm camping at Mississippi Pallisades, doing a canoe and fishing trip on the Galena River on Saturday, and Sunday I'm going to torture the family with a side trip to the Apple.

Seems like everyone is in exploration mode.

Fun, isn't it.

AndrewR wrote:Vermillion.

I'd be down for that.

Sunday??