Ellis Lake, Horseshoe Lake

Turbid Waters and Bedding Bass

This weekend I caught some fish. Although they didn’t take me into my backing the real task was to figure out what worked and didn’t work.

Horseshoe Lake
I’m still trying to figure out how to effectively fish this turbid pond. No clarity changes the game. After throwing a few small flies and a few big flies it was clear that nothing was interested. I saw fish jumping and cruising but didn’t have much luck hooking them. In the evening I saw what resembled a cruising shark in the shallows. My guess is that it was a big catfish or carp cruising around. I threw a few flies in front of it but no takes. I did manage to catch a small catfish on a fly that I had tied specifically for the lake though. I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Hopefully I will be able to catch fish more consistently when I’m out there.

First Catfish of 2015

Ellis Lake
The bass fishing has been tough and I haven’t quite figured out how to catch them when I target them out here. I did see a few bass sitting on their beds but they spooked as soon as I walked by. There is no use targeting these fish as they are twitterpated for the spawn. It also isn’t very nice to rip spawning fish off their beds as it is exactly the same as pulling trout of their redds. Just don’t do it.
The weather was beautiful but the only fish that were biting were the bluegills. They were eating bread chum and took whatever small fly I threw at them. Easy fun.

Yuba goldfields, Yuba River

Yuba Goldfields Gill Fry

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.

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