By: Wayne Gustaveson July 28, 2010
Lake Elevation: 3636 Water Temperature 82-87 F
The best feeding period is the last two hours of daylight. On calm evenings it is possible to catch 10-25 surface feeding stripers. If the pesky afternoon wind blows there are not a lot of fish caught.
Expect to see quick little pods of 5-10 stripers busting the surface and then going right back down. If the schools are larger or the small school comes back up a number of times then it is possible to catch more fish. The southern lake is pretty quiet with only a few stripers caught per day. Catch rate is more respectable in the San Juan and at Red Canyon in Good Hope Bay.
It is possible to find a resting school of stripers that will respond to bait. Stripers favor a few deep resting spots and can be caught in good numbers at depths of 30-70 feet. Find stripers on the graph, chum heartily and then drop bait to the depth that stripers were seen. This action is spotty as stripers really prefer to go in search of shad. They may be resting in a deep holding area one day and be gone 3 miles up channel the next.
Expect real boils to begin in mid-August after shad have grown larger.
Bass fishing follows the same pattern. Fish are deep and not very cooperative. Little smallmouth are still shallow and will provide consistent action, but larger fish are as deep as 35-50 feet. All of this will change as surface temperature declines a few degrees and the full moon wanes. This week best fishing will be found on calm evenings during the last two hours of daylight.
Catfish and sunfish are not affected by full moon. They still provide fast action for kids of all ages on live worms near camp.
