
Shasta Lake
Kokanee Bite Explodes!!
Rob Hower of the Shasta area gave us this report: Shasta lake has just hit the 70 degree top water temperature in the morning. The lake has started dropping water levels and is about 13’ below crest. We do have some great news for you, Kokanee fishing is as good as it gets. They’re stacked up just about everywhere right now. Jeff Goodwin and I have been out prospecting for those silver bullets. We can definitely tell you that the bite is fantastic right now. We found them around 35’ down and they have been really attracted to pink dodgers as well as a 24k gold dodgers. We picked up almost 30 fish in the 14” bracket in about 2 hours. McCloud arm around Hirtz bay to the Shasta Caverns and the entire Sacramento arm as well as the main body have fish stacked up. We have been running typical lures like Uncle Larry’s spinners and everything is tipped with corn.
Jeff and I also had some time to try and find some King salmon, and we did find some deep in the different parts of the lake. We ran pretty much the same thing for all Kings including rolling anchovies and cut plugs along with white plastic grubs. We picked up 4 nice fish in the 2 to 4+ pound range, releasing all of them. The morning we had gone out they were in the 80’-90’ range and we were going 2.5 mph. The bite didn’t last but a few hours.
The trout bite has been a little bit slower than normal. Patty Poling and myself have been really looking for some rainbows. By now we would already be on them. We have found them in very small groups and once we locate them we have to keep making circles back over them. They were really going after black and orange copper backed spoons and green and black with sliver backed spoons. This will probably change as conditions change, but right now we’re getting them in 35-40’ range. We just really started marking some shad balls, but haven’t seen them in their stomachs. Right now they are pretty much filled with daphnia, that green applesauce. We’ve been slowing down our speed to about 2.5 mph, which is pretty easy to do with the new Itroll on the kicker. We are going to start getting some high temperatures coming well into the 100 degree range and this will start pushing those fish down deeper.