Sierra_Smitty
04-23-2012, 07:24 PM
Northern Cali Spring Bass Trip 2012
Summation for those that don’t want to read….
Lakes Fished – Lake Almanor, Butt Lake, Antelope Lake
Baits – For largemouth…everything in the box. For smallies – tubes, rapala X-rap D10’s, weighted swimbaits
Gear – Dobyns, Skeet Reesse, Fenwick HMX, & Powell Rods..Daiwa & Shimano Reels of various models.
Fish Count – LMB a fair number but nothing over 4lbs. Smallies a bunch, biggest going 4lb 4oz.
Weather – Everything from blizzard, to breezy, to hot as hell and everything in between.
Water Temps – Much like the weather…all over the place. Lowest was 42 degrees, highest was 67 degrees…talk about a swing!!!!!
Fun Rating – 10 out of 10
Tourney showing – Pretty shabby, but it was fun.
THE REPORT
A little back story….
Every year I try to make it up to Northern California, more specifically the area around Susanville, CA, to visit my friend Mike who I’ve known since grade school. I’ve been doing these trips annually if not twice a year since I moved to bishop going on 7 years ago. At first we fished for trout…Eagle Lake & Pyramid primarily….which are amazing fisheries, truly amazing. But since I live in trout country, for the most part I get my fill of trout fishing during our season at Parchers so what started out as trout fishing soon became bass fishing as my buddy got bit by the bass bug and learned to fish the lakes up there.
Our first “all bass” trip in spring 2009 yielded largemouth fishing like I’ve never experienced…driving over snow covered roads to be one of the first boats of the season on Antelope Lake we scored tons of big fish…nearly a dozen over the 5lb mark and my biggest that year was 8lbs 12oz. Then we fished Almanor for smallies to 4lbs. Needless to say, my trips have been primarily bass oriented up there since. The next year we better luck on smallies at Butt Lake and Almanor but I still managed to break my PB largemouth at Antelope with a 9lb 1oz brut. Sadly, well for me at least, we opened early last year so there was no spring bass trip – ironically as I’d just written a piece for Fish Taco Chronicles on the smallie fishing up there which started out with the line “There is one thing I know with absolute certainty – every April after the Long Beach and Del Mar Fred Hall shows are over, I go bass fishing.” Wow….I joked with my brother while working on that article that I hope I don’t jinx myself….should have knocked on wood I think hahaha.
So…no mountain bass trip in 2011. Ouch. This had me SOOOOO fired up for this year. My buddy’s wife was in Japan for 6 weeks so I took a whole 2 weeks off to visit, planning to do nothing but fishing. It was a good one. I’ll keep this relatively short so as not to bore….
Arrived no April 6. We hung out, talked about strategy, the plan, the baits etc. etc. My buddy is in a bass club up there and needed someone for the back seat so we figured we’d spend out time fun fishing while pre-fishing for his tournament at the same time. We spent the first 4 days fishing Antelope, a harder lake to dial in but one that we’d done so good on in April over the past years that we felt pretty confident. ..especially since my buddy was out the week prior and his neighbor stuck a fish over 8lbs, which is what we were hoping to see. Unfortunately it was not to be…the odd winter and lack of snow wreaked havoc on the conditions at the lake and what are usually long rocky points were overgrown with weeds making our preferred tactic of running deep diving crankbaits all but useless. Every cast in the usual spots brought heavy loads of weeds, not bass. We tried shallower running cranks to just graze the tops of the weeds but to no avail. So we threw everything in the box….jigs on deep rock piles, soft plastics in shallow, drop shot, senkos, blades, rip baits, texas craws, a-rigs…hell, my buddy even threw a topwater at one point simply out of frustration. We caught some bass, but very few and nothing over 4lbs…but the joke was that I brought the trout mojo along for the ride because we couldn’t keep trout in the 1 to 2lb range off the hook. We caught rainbows on 6” senkos, crankbaits, texas craws, even jigs! The smallest trout was about a pound and was a Brookie, but the rest were all over 1.5lbs or so…tons of ‘em. In hindsight, I should have brought my box of big swimmies…more on that later. Long story short – it was tough fishing and we had no confidence for the tournament…the only upside was that we ran into a handful of other local guys having the same luck.
So we switched gears and went searchin’ for smallies at Almanor….just in time for some nasty weather. Wind kept us off the water one day…a much needed break in the middle of 14 days fishing…but we fished in some NASTY weather…cold, wind, snow..it was somethin’. One day we got turned around at the pass and had to run to town to buy chains, chain up and proceed to the lake in a blizzard…it was awesome. Almanor has been a tough lake for me…all the fish come in flurries…you’re on a WFO bite for an hour or two and then it goes lockjaw on you. This trip was pretty much the same…we caught fish just about everywhere but it was one or two fish per spot and that was it. If you missed a bite, one fish. If you missed two bites, no fish. Move, fish, move, fish, move, fish. That’s just how it goes. The quality of the fish early on was great averaging over 3lbs…as the trip went on that average decreased, unfortunately. It’s amazing how a few weeks can turn a lake upside down with relation to fish behavior. At first all the biting fish were in 8 to 14ft of water…mostly on rocky points or on ledges. Towards the end the biting fish were in 8ft to as shallow as 3ft on very much structure oriented – every fish was on a boulder, a rock, a stump or a weed pile. One thing that did stay consistent was that when the wind was blowing, the fish were biting. Stillness on the water meant no bites…it was almost without exception.
Honey Lake/ Mountain Bass Club 2-Day Tournament Review
I’m not a tournament bass fisherman….but its kinda fun. My buddy is in a club, he loves to fish and its very smart fishing with the best in the area when you wanna learn new things. Some great sticks in that club…some guys that used to fish FLW, some guys that own plastics companies…really a strong group of anglers to be around and all friendly great guys, none of that overly competitive BS you find when guys take fishing too serious. I fished my first tournament at Shasta with the same club in February and it was a great experience. We fished 1 day at Antelope and 1 day at Almanor. We found conditions on tournament day at Antelope completely different than we did 4 days prior with fish cruising the shallows an hanging tight to weed beds. On all previous trips this time around we didn’t see a single cruising bass. This made getting a good limit difficult as most of the biters were in the 1 to 2lb. The guy who won at Antelope threw swimmies all day for a few bites but one was 7.5lbs and one was 4.5lbs….that’s how you win under those conditions…lesson learned. On smallie day it was anyones ball game as the shallow cruising fish were nowhere to be found..until 1pm when the water temp hit 64 degrees after the morning reading of 47. Everyone had a few fish in the boat but if you were in the flats during the magic hour when the dead calm became a nice easy breeze, you weighed in a nice stringer. We got impatient and moved on about 30 minutes too soon. Lesson learned. Still, it was a total blast and I can’t freaking wait until next spring.
Here are a few pictures for your enjoyment….beautiful country up there and fishing hard for 15 days with a great friend and my pup Cabella is priceless. Gotta love it.
Peace,
Smitty
The day we got blown off the lake we fished from shore…..in the snow…oh yeah!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0349-compressed.jpg
How sweet of a pad is this?
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0365-compressed.jpg
Couldn’t get Cabella to look at the camera…she loves the feesh
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0376-compressed.jpg
Rigged up for a smallie day
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0386-compressed.jpg
Damn pretty fish!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140004-compressed.jpg
Oh ya
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170012-compressed.jpg
Antelope at Sunset
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170011-compressed.jpg
Brrrrr
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130007-compressed.jpg
The sweater kinda says it all….
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140005-compressed.jpg
OH YA BABY!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140002-compressed.jpg
Give us a kiss miss Smallie!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4150002-compressed.jpg
Wind is blowin’, fish is bitin’
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4160006-compressed.jpg
4lbs 4oz…..biggest to date for me…so stoked!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4150003-compressed.jpg
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130008-compressed.jpg
Mike with a LMB
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170008-compressed.jpg
Smile ya jerk!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140009-compressed.jpg
Fists full of smallies
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140006-compressed.jpg
Yup…snow and bass…snow and bass…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130005-compressed.jpg
Pretty fish
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140012-compressed.jpg
OH…and Mike kept catching these on accident…not a bad booby prize…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130009-compressed.jpg
Coffee, Lake, Boat, Repeat…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4515-doc.jpg
Trout boat turned bass boat….complete with dual HDS units and power pole.
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4539-compressed.jpg
You know you wanna fish here! Mt. Lassen in the distance, sick!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4555-compressed.jpg
If I was a reader, I’d read a book on that bench…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4526-compressed.jpg
Dude troutin’ way out there
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4547-compressed.jpg
And another accidental big brown…this one went a hair under 4lbs
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4542-compressed.jpg
Waaaaaaaahhhhhh
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4522compressed.jpg
My favorite fish finder…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4556-compressed.jpg
Small…but the right kind
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4545-compressed.jpg
I’m under there somewhere…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4518-compressed.jpg
Lassen Rocks
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4561-compressed.jpg
Cabella….AKA “the turd”
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170012-compressed.jpg
Fishin…love it..
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0392-compressed.jpg
Summation for those that don’t want to read….
Lakes Fished – Lake Almanor, Butt Lake, Antelope Lake
Baits – For largemouth…everything in the box. For smallies – tubes, rapala X-rap D10’s, weighted swimbaits
Gear – Dobyns, Skeet Reesse, Fenwick HMX, & Powell Rods..Daiwa & Shimano Reels of various models.
Fish Count – LMB a fair number but nothing over 4lbs. Smallies a bunch, biggest going 4lb 4oz.
Weather – Everything from blizzard, to breezy, to hot as hell and everything in between.
Water Temps – Much like the weather…all over the place. Lowest was 42 degrees, highest was 67 degrees…talk about a swing!!!!!
Fun Rating – 10 out of 10
Tourney showing – Pretty shabby, but it was fun.
THE REPORT
A little back story….
Every year I try to make it up to Northern California, more specifically the area around Susanville, CA, to visit my friend Mike who I’ve known since grade school. I’ve been doing these trips annually if not twice a year since I moved to bishop going on 7 years ago. At first we fished for trout…Eagle Lake & Pyramid primarily….which are amazing fisheries, truly amazing. But since I live in trout country, for the most part I get my fill of trout fishing during our season at Parchers so what started out as trout fishing soon became bass fishing as my buddy got bit by the bass bug and learned to fish the lakes up there.
Our first “all bass” trip in spring 2009 yielded largemouth fishing like I’ve never experienced…driving over snow covered roads to be one of the first boats of the season on Antelope Lake we scored tons of big fish…nearly a dozen over the 5lb mark and my biggest that year was 8lbs 12oz. Then we fished Almanor for smallies to 4lbs. Needless to say, my trips have been primarily bass oriented up there since. The next year we better luck on smallies at Butt Lake and Almanor but I still managed to break my PB largemouth at Antelope with a 9lb 1oz brut. Sadly, well for me at least, we opened early last year so there was no spring bass trip – ironically as I’d just written a piece for Fish Taco Chronicles on the smallie fishing up there which started out with the line “There is one thing I know with absolute certainty – every April after the Long Beach and Del Mar Fred Hall shows are over, I go bass fishing.” Wow….I joked with my brother while working on that article that I hope I don’t jinx myself….should have knocked on wood I think hahaha.
So…no mountain bass trip in 2011. Ouch. This had me SOOOOO fired up for this year. My buddy’s wife was in Japan for 6 weeks so I took a whole 2 weeks off to visit, planning to do nothing but fishing. It was a good one. I’ll keep this relatively short so as not to bore….
Arrived no April 6. We hung out, talked about strategy, the plan, the baits etc. etc. My buddy is in a bass club up there and needed someone for the back seat so we figured we’d spend out time fun fishing while pre-fishing for his tournament at the same time. We spent the first 4 days fishing Antelope, a harder lake to dial in but one that we’d done so good on in April over the past years that we felt pretty confident. ..especially since my buddy was out the week prior and his neighbor stuck a fish over 8lbs, which is what we were hoping to see. Unfortunately it was not to be…the odd winter and lack of snow wreaked havoc on the conditions at the lake and what are usually long rocky points were overgrown with weeds making our preferred tactic of running deep diving crankbaits all but useless. Every cast in the usual spots brought heavy loads of weeds, not bass. We tried shallower running cranks to just graze the tops of the weeds but to no avail. So we threw everything in the box….jigs on deep rock piles, soft plastics in shallow, drop shot, senkos, blades, rip baits, texas craws, a-rigs…hell, my buddy even threw a topwater at one point simply out of frustration. We caught some bass, but very few and nothing over 4lbs…but the joke was that I brought the trout mojo along for the ride because we couldn’t keep trout in the 1 to 2lb range off the hook. We caught rainbows on 6” senkos, crankbaits, texas craws, even jigs! The smallest trout was about a pound and was a Brookie, but the rest were all over 1.5lbs or so…tons of ‘em. In hindsight, I should have brought my box of big swimmies…more on that later. Long story short – it was tough fishing and we had no confidence for the tournament…the only upside was that we ran into a handful of other local guys having the same luck.
So we switched gears and went searchin’ for smallies at Almanor….just in time for some nasty weather. Wind kept us off the water one day…a much needed break in the middle of 14 days fishing…but we fished in some NASTY weather…cold, wind, snow..it was somethin’. One day we got turned around at the pass and had to run to town to buy chains, chain up and proceed to the lake in a blizzard…it was awesome. Almanor has been a tough lake for me…all the fish come in flurries…you’re on a WFO bite for an hour or two and then it goes lockjaw on you. This trip was pretty much the same…we caught fish just about everywhere but it was one or two fish per spot and that was it. If you missed a bite, one fish. If you missed two bites, no fish. Move, fish, move, fish, move, fish. That’s just how it goes. The quality of the fish early on was great averaging over 3lbs…as the trip went on that average decreased, unfortunately. It’s amazing how a few weeks can turn a lake upside down with relation to fish behavior. At first all the biting fish were in 8 to 14ft of water…mostly on rocky points or on ledges. Towards the end the biting fish were in 8ft to as shallow as 3ft on very much structure oriented – every fish was on a boulder, a rock, a stump or a weed pile. One thing that did stay consistent was that when the wind was blowing, the fish were biting. Stillness on the water meant no bites…it was almost without exception.
Honey Lake/ Mountain Bass Club 2-Day Tournament Review
I’m not a tournament bass fisherman….but its kinda fun. My buddy is in a club, he loves to fish and its very smart fishing with the best in the area when you wanna learn new things. Some great sticks in that club…some guys that used to fish FLW, some guys that own plastics companies…really a strong group of anglers to be around and all friendly great guys, none of that overly competitive BS you find when guys take fishing too serious. I fished my first tournament at Shasta with the same club in February and it was a great experience. We fished 1 day at Antelope and 1 day at Almanor. We found conditions on tournament day at Antelope completely different than we did 4 days prior with fish cruising the shallows an hanging tight to weed beds. On all previous trips this time around we didn’t see a single cruising bass. This made getting a good limit difficult as most of the biters were in the 1 to 2lb. The guy who won at Antelope threw swimmies all day for a few bites but one was 7.5lbs and one was 4.5lbs….that’s how you win under those conditions…lesson learned. On smallie day it was anyones ball game as the shallow cruising fish were nowhere to be found..until 1pm when the water temp hit 64 degrees after the morning reading of 47. Everyone had a few fish in the boat but if you were in the flats during the magic hour when the dead calm became a nice easy breeze, you weighed in a nice stringer. We got impatient and moved on about 30 minutes too soon. Lesson learned. Still, it was a total blast and I can’t freaking wait until next spring.
Here are a few pictures for your enjoyment….beautiful country up there and fishing hard for 15 days with a great friend and my pup Cabella is priceless. Gotta love it.
Peace,
Smitty
The day we got blown off the lake we fished from shore…..in the snow…oh yeah!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0349-compressed.jpg
How sweet of a pad is this?
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0365-compressed.jpg
Couldn’t get Cabella to look at the camera…she loves the feesh
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0376-compressed.jpg
Rigged up for a smallie day
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0386-compressed.jpg
Damn pretty fish!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140004-compressed.jpg
Oh ya
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170012-compressed.jpg
Antelope at Sunset
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170011-compressed.jpg
Brrrrr
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130007-compressed.jpg
The sweater kinda says it all….
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140005-compressed.jpg
OH YA BABY!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140002-compressed.jpg
Give us a kiss miss Smallie!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4150002-compressed.jpg
Wind is blowin’, fish is bitin’
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4160006-compressed.jpg
4lbs 4oz…..biggest to date for me…so stoked!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4150003-compressed.jpg
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130008-compressed.jpg
Mike with a LMB
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170008-compressed.jpg
Smile ya jerk!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140009-compressed.jpg
Fists full of smallies
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140006-compressed.jpg
Yup…snow and bass…snow and bass…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130005-compressed.jpg
Pretty fish
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4140012-compressed.jpg
OH…and Mike kept catching these on accident…not a bad booby prize…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4130009-compressed.jpg
Coffee, Lake, Boat, Repeat…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4515-doc.jpg
Trout boat turned bass boat….complete with dual HDS units and power pole.
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4539-compressed.jpg
You know you wanna fish here! Mt. Lassen in the distance, sick!
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4555-compressed.jpg
If I was a reader, I’d read a book on that bench…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4526-compressed.jpg
Dude troutin’ way out there
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4547-compressed.jpg
And another accidental big brown…this one went a hair under 4lbs
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4542-compressed.jpg
Waaaaaaaahhhhhh
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4522compressed.jpg
My favorite fish finder…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4556-compressed.jpg
Small…but the right kind
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4545-compressed.jpg
I’m under there somewhere…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4518-compressed.jpg
Lassen Rocks
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/DSC_4561-compressed.jpg
Cabella….AKA “the turd”
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/P4170012-compressed.jpg
Fishin…love it..
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o181/sierrasmitty/IMG_0392-compressed.jpg