Yuba goldfields, Yuba River

Yuba Goldfields Gill Fry

by Matt
Didn’t take pictures of the fish…
Just some thugs

The weekend was planned to meet in Marysville for my Mom’s birthday day. I decided that I wanted to get her some fish for a fish fry and the best place to fish was the Yuba Goldfields. Fly rods and spin rod at hand Manda, Nick, and I set out to catch some panfish for an epic fish fry.

Yuba Goldfields
I’ve never tried to drive past the parking area below the bridge of the Yuba River. The road is “not maintained by the county” and I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d get stuck not having a 4×4. After previously hiking that road I found that much of the road is still in decent condition therefore I was able to drive (carefully) further downstream. Now I have more accessible water to explore on the Yuba.

After getting their waders on, Manda, Nick, and I hiked to the pond. The fishing was okay. We all caught a few but the sun was high and the fish were being pretty spooky. A total of 8 panfish were kept with 4 or 5 bass released. The panfish here are quite big therefore we settled for quality over quantity.

As we hiked through we saw 4 or 5 anglers fishing a 100ft long run. The egg bite is on at the Yuba River I assume. Didn’t see any one hook into any but there were quite a few people out.

I wanted to drive down more to see how far I could get my car. My car did a pretty good job covering a lot of the road. We stopped twice to check out a few ponds that I was hoping had fish but we didn’t see anything but little minnows. I’ll to recheck in the spring, hopefully there are fish that I overlooked there. My uncle’s best bass out there was a huge largemouth bass, he never landed it but claims it was 12 pounds, of course I’m going to check again.

Feather River, One Mile Pond

Is It Prime Time?

by Matt

I recently fished the Feather River for steelhead and didn’t have much luck despite waking up at 5am and being the first on the river.

There is quite a bit of pressure throughout the river with salmon fishing still open until the 15th and “prime-time” steelheading throughout the low flow. I talked to the other anglers that were out and they said they weren’t doing too well either. The weather has also made it difficult with temperatures in the 90s and high sun no clouds at around 10:00. And I thought summer was over…
I didn’t get skunked because of the pike minnows but I didn’t get any steelhead.

The salmon are pairing up and scrapping redds throughout the low flow. The event is pretty amazing to watch and wade through because you can get extremely close to them and observe as they chase each other up and down all day. Watch your step though! To conserve the fishery, anglers must respect the salmon and do the best we can to try and not interfere with their ritual of spawning.

I later explored One Mile Pond/Vance Pond and found it a pretty neat place. A lot of bluegills and bass inhabit the pond. There are also a lot of weed beds that would make it a great place to throw frogs. I’ll have to try it someday. The only thing I don’t like about the pond is the traffic around it. The Oroville Wildlife Refuge road is usually seldomly driven on which means you’ll probably see less than two vehicles the entire time especially on a weekdays. I must have seen like 6-8 vehicles pass while I was fishing. It made me wonder where everyone was going. A lot of the drivers didn’t look like anglers to me. Not a very safe place to leave your car and go too far in my opinion not with all the hooligans out there in Oroville.

Sorry, but the steelhead are in an another run.

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Keep Calm and Fly Fish™