Shaver Lake and Dinkey Creek are Fresno County’s most popular high elevation fisheries. Shaver Lake is about an hour east of Fresno and Dinkey Creek is about 30 minutes beyond the lake. Shaver Lake is known for its abundance of kokanee salmon making it the best kokanee fishery in the Central Valley and Dinkey Creek is one of a few accessible small streams in the entire county. Both the lake and the creek are stocked to the absolute brim with trout every year. I had the opportunity to fish both with my cousins and was curious to see whether or not these fisheries lived up to their reputation.
This spring continues to be a strange one with mix of warm and cold weather. The day before we were supposed to head up to the lake and creek a cold front came through and brought rain all evening in the valley and snow at about 5,000ft. Thankfully the forecast for the following day only called for a bit of showers in the morning and cooler than usual temperatures with a low of 28 degrees and a high of 50 degrees.
We were on Shaver at about 8am and it seemed like the cold weather kept a lot of people home this day. My first impression of Shaver Lake was that it was a lot smaller than I had anticipated. The lake was about 50ft from full capacity and the clarity was about 10ft. The weather was overcast and showers rippled the surface for the first few hours. Fish were jumping all over the lake feeding on size 14 – 16 midges that we saw hatching throughout the day. We set out on my cousin’s inflatable boat, an Intex Mariner 4, and trolled relatively close to the boat launch. I was using my Jay Fair topline system with a pair of streamers while my cousins trolled with their spinning rods. I initially started with an olive and orange fly but after no hits for about 20 minutes I switched to a black fly. Dark day, dark fly. I added some movement to my fly and after about 10 minutes I got my first grab. It took about another 30 minutes before I got my second fish.
At around 10am the midge hatch was really starting to pop off and I thought it would be interesting to see if we could catch a fish nymphing so we went back to the launch, rigged our fly rods, and set back out to the lake. The boat didn’t have an anchor system so I knew it was going to be a challenge trying to get things to work. This challenge proved too difficult to overcome as we would slowly drift away from our offerings after casting them out. I called it quits after about 30 minutes and thought it would be a better idea to hit Dinkey Creek before it got too late.
Dinkey Creek is a tributary of the North Fork of the Kings River. It is by far the most popular creek in the Fresno county due to its size and accessibility. Although there are many creeks within the range of Dinkey, they are all small and difficult to access. Dinkey Creek can be broken down into three sections: upper Dinkey where the three campgrounds are located, middle Dinkey the section around and below the McKinley Grove bridge, and lower Dinkey where its meets with the confluence of the North Fork of the Kings River. The upper section is made of slick granite, the middle section is freestone with a lot of pocket water and pools, and the lower section is mostly canyon.
We arrived at Dinkey Creek at around noon and found the creek to be somewhat busy due to it being the opening weekend of trout season. The water was pretty high at around 450 CFS above the North Fork of the Kings River and there were patches of snow throughout the creek. From my experience, spring usually arrives in May at higher elevations and trout season can be slow until the weather warms. I wasn’t very hopeful we’d catch anything but DFG did recently stock the creek that week and the week before. We fished around the bridge and I initially worked my way upstream to explore and avoid fishing around other people. After not finding any fish in the pocket water and pools I decided to walk along the bridge to see if I could spot anything. I was amazed to find fish absolutely stacked in the pool below: there must have been over 200 fish just casually swimming and holding their spot.
It was just fish in a barrel for me at that point and good practice for my cousins. The gear fishermen had a tough time getting the fish to bite but I was hooking a fish every other cast. The fish were taking prince and BWO nymphs. I probably brought in two dozen fish within two hours. Dinkey Creek is probably at its prime from mid-May to late June. The creek is highly runoff dependent and once the spring runoff is over the water levels get extremely low in the summer and Dinkey is often reduced to a puddle by fall. I think Dinkey Creek would probably be the most fun to fish during primetime especially further away from the road and campgrounds where the holdover fish have adapted to eating bugs. I’ll most likely never fish Dinkey Creek again but for being the only good creek near Fresno it seemed like a nice place to take the family to camp and fish.
With Shaver Lake and Dinkey Creek crossed off on my list of places to visit in Fresno County the next big trip I have planned for the area is camping in the heart of the Kings Canyon along the South Fork of the Kings River.
