Urban Fishing at Christmas
December 30, 2025
For weeks before Christmas it was cold in St. Louis, but as the holiday approached it suddenly got warm and humid. Fog rose from the surface of the Mississippi, so barges and locks looked like apparitions in a miasma. The fog filled the river channel, overflowed the banks, and ran into fields like a flood. The Sunday after Christmas, it was 72 degrees and damp, but through the afternoon and evening the temperature fell again—56 degrees—and by morning it was 16 degrees, with 30-mile-per-hour wind gusts.
On Saturday I was interested to see people fishing seriously in Jefferson Lake in Forest Park, St. Louis’ answer to Central Park. At 10 a.m., a tower on the nearby WashU medical campus could just be seen across the lake through the fog. The bike lane in the road along the shore was being used for a Frostbite Race Series event, but the runners ran in 60-degree temps, with a wind chill that felt like 40.
There are ten lakes and a “linear waterway” in the park, but the nine-acre Jefferson Lake “is where Forest Park visitors come to fish,” says Forest Park Forever, “a private nonprofit conservancy that partners with the City of St. Louis to restore, maintain and sustain Forest Park as one of America’s great urban public parks for a diverse community of visitors to enjoy….”
Jefferson is 14 feet at its deepest but holds Largemouth Bass, Channel Cats, Crappie, Carp, Topminnows, Golden Shiners, and Bluegill. Being a non-fisherman and non-city dweller, I was surprised by the variety. Learning that Rainbow Trout are stocked in the lake twice a year felt like becoming aware of a glitch in the matrix. Weren’t they usually swimming up some permanently chilled, crystalline river in the Pacific Northwest? A search says there are no prohibitions on eating what comes out of Jefferson Lake but, as with any urban body of water, to check for specific advisories with the St. Louis Parks Department or Missouri Department of Conservation.
A couple with lawn chairs at water’s edge and good-looking fishing rigs had been there for an hour and a half but had not caught anything. He described his two solid nibbles as tantalizingly disappointing. She said they were headed to the supermarket to get some things, then home to make cheesesteaks from a roast left over from the holiday. She was holding a small poodle named Claude, who wore a coat and still shivered.
Two younger guys fishing with them had not had anything more than nibbles, either, using lures. They told me about a pair of guys who had been in earlier, took four fish in quick succession, and left. They wondered what bait the other two had used. They were headed out to Seoul Taco to get some bulgogi burritos and looked forward to finally getting warm in the car. The only trout they had seen was a small rainbow with flecks of red and green, floating belly-up in the shallows.
