The bass tournaments start back up on Clear Lake this weekend with an American Bass team event scheduled for Sunday. The tournament operates out of the Skylark Motel in Lakeport and the weigh-in begins at 3 p.m.
Fishermen can enter the tournament as late as 6 a.m. on Sunday morning at the Tackle It tackle shop located next to the Skylark Motel on North Main Street in Lakeport.
The tournament fishermen will find anything but good conditions as a record cold front is forecast to hit the area by Saturday. In fact, morning temperatures are expected to dip as low as 18 degrees and that should send the water temperature down to 40 degrees. This will be more like Minnesota ice fishing than Clear Lake bass fishing.
A few bass are being caught but overall the fishing has been very tough. Most of the fishermen are lucky to put five fish in the boat for an entire day”s worth of effort.
The most successful lure has been the Lucky Craft LV500 (a lipless crankbait) retrieved slowly along the bottom. Some of the fishermen are yo-yoing the lure on the bottom.
A major factor in the success of the fishermen is the moving shad. For a brief period, the shad were balled up off the Nice shoreline and grebes and seagulls could be seen by the hundreds feeding on the shad. The huge schools have now moved south and are located off Indian Beach in Glenhaven.
The reason the shad are on the move is because they are plankton eaters and the plankton is drifting around the lake. Another factor is that in many areas the shad have consumed most of the available plankton and they have to move in order to locate new food sources.
The question the fishermen are asking at Clear Lake is what has happened to the crappie? Two years ago it wasn”t unusual to catch and release up to 300 or even 500 crappie a day. The crappie fishing showed a decline last year and that decline has continued this year. In fact, compared to the fishing two years ago, the crappie fishery is only shadow of what it used to be.
Local fishing guide Ross England summed it up best. “In my opinion just too many crappie have been caught and kept and the result is that the fishery has basically crashed,” England said.
England could have a valid point. Two years ago more than 1,000 adult crappie were being caught and kept each day. That”s at least 7,000-8,000 crappie a week and this went on for weeks.
Crappie are a school fish and the areas around Kono Tayee and Shag Rock were wall to wall with boats and everyone was hauling limits and overlimits of fish. In the end, the crappie fishery just couldn”t stand that type of overharvesting.
The Lake County Board of Supervisors, on the recommendation of the County Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee, asked the California Fish and Game Commission to lower the daily limit of crappie to 15 from the present 25. The Department of Fish and Game (DFG) objected to the lowering of the daily limit and the commission rejected the county”s request.
This didn”t come as any surprise since the DFG hasn”t really been involved in managing Clear Lake”s fisheries in several years.
It will be interesting to see how successful the crappie spawn will be this spring. The good thing about crappie is that given a chance they can recover rapidly.
The good news is that the bluegill continue to be caught by the dozens. It”s just a matter of putting a worm on a hook and casting it out.
A few hardy souls have been out on Upper Blue Lake fishing for trout and overall the action is rated fair. The lake was stocked last week and won”t be stocked again until February.
The bitter cold weather has kept fishermen away from Indian Valley Reservoir. The fishing should be good for trout for anyone brave enough to make the trip.
