Fishing Report, April 9, 2007

Mixed Bag Fun
Spring is here and that means lots of cool stuff to do!

I kicked off April with a week in Redding, where we chased a variety of species on a bunch of different water ways: Rainbows on the Sacramento; king salmon and spotted bass on Shasta Lake and kokanee salmon on Whiskeytown Reservoir.

This week, it’s more shark fishing; striper chasing on the Sacramento and the last American river steelhead missions.

Here’s what’s been happening…

Combo Trips
Last week, we did some combo trips in which we’d side-drift for nice native rainbows on the Sac in the morning and then mooch for kings on Shasta in the afternoons. The trout bite was extremely good on small chunks of roe and we did 20-30+ fish a day on that. The crawler and plug bites, however, were el-suck-o. The majority of the trout averaged a solid 2-3 pounds and we only caught a small handful of the 13-inch models.

At about 2 PM each day, we’d head for Lake Shasta to mooch for its sweet landlocked kings which averaged 3-4 pounds apiece. On light gear, these fish were awesome battlers and everybody had a ball catching them. They all came on chunked anchovy in 120-160 feet of water.



While at Shasta, we also fished Carolina rigs for bass and ended up catching some nice spotts to 3 or 4 pounds. While not completely full, the lake level is looking pretty good and there were plenty of shale banks and submerged islands to hold fish.

Upcoming Action
As I noted earlier, we’ll be back on the shark program this week and may even sneak a peak at halibut. There are still steelhead in the American and we’ll hit that two more times this week before we wrap things up for the season. Striped bass fishing has been a little up-and-down lately in the Sacramento River but it should start ripping any day now.

Related Articles:

• Big Spring Trout at Shasta
• Redding, CA: Angler’s Paradise!?
• Dreamin’ of Time Travel
• Chasing Steelhead on the Los Angeles River
• California Smallmouth