After reading a report of some big trout being taken at Collins Lake, I put together a small trip to go out and see what we could do.
My group shrunk significantly by the meeting time the next morning. So I took the 1 individual left out for the adventure. We arrived at the lake to find the campground full and lots of activity at the store at 7:00am. We launched the boat and ran to the south east corner where I instantly started marking fish. Lines in and within 5 minutes our first fish was in the boat and about 10 minutes later another fish in the net.
Then things slowed down. I changed lures, speeds, depths and locations but could never get bite wide open. We had to work for our bites and they consistently came. We ended the day with 7 fish landed, 2 unbuttoned half way in and numerous missed strikes.
The fish came on a Shasta Tackle dodger with a Berkley Grub, a Needle fish and a Hum dinger and a Rapala I had several bites on the arctic fox trolling tube fly but none would hook up. I felt that a lot of the fish were short striking which were the cause of a lot of the missed bites.
Happy Angler Fighting a Fish..
Once you found a location holding fish I suggest making multiple passes over that area, I trolled all over but all the bites seemed to come from 3 small areas in the lake. The water temp was 78, and the lake was low enough that the usual under water island in the middle was exposed and all the normal flooded trees were already out of the water. The fish were caught using Cannon Downriggers down 15 – 35ft. Most of the bites were in the 20-25ft range.
A Couple of the todays Catch…
Remember Xtreme-Angling for all your Northern California Fishing Adventures.,
Capt. RJ Bennett