How to Fish Lake Powell During the Spring

By Hartt Wixom
(As published in Utah Outdoors magazine)

Long ago I learned a valuable lesson about the art of angling. No matter how famous the fishing hole, you need a battle plan. The first step in my plan is timing: when to go. In my opinion, the best time to ply a warmwater fishery is when temperatures inch toward 60 degrees. That's when the metabolisms of bass, crappie, walleye and sunfish species accelerate after a long winter famine. That is when they not only move into shallow water to spawn, but seek here and now to fill empty stomachs. At Lake Powell, that magic time occurs in late April and early May.

My second step is to know what food they subsist upon - not just dine on occasionally but feast on daily. For Lake Powell, that means crayfish or threadfin shad, the latter most likely to be active when spawning at those 60-degree temperatures mentioned earlier. Crayfish, too, prefer warmer temperatures.

The third step is to recognize the specific habitat of your target species. At Powell, that means structure: undulating shorelines, gaps between boulders or vegetation, uneven bottom terrain. Add them all together in the late spring at Lake Powell and they spell "paradise."

I've enjoyed dozens of memorable trips to Powell, the most beautiful artificial lake I know of in all of North America. Its 1,800 miles of broken, cliff-lined shoreline contain many sublime black bass lairs, whether fishing from boat or bank.

My primary target species is the smallmouth bass, although I'll take a largemouth or walleye anytime. I consider striped bass a bonus fish, one that is reproducing so fast at Powell that limit restrictions have been removed. "Please catch and keep all you want," Wayne Gustaveson, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources project leader for the lake, told me one day as we headed out of Wahweap toward Last Chance Bay. Gustaveson kept a rod ready, rigged with a 1/4- ounce white jig, for stripers. "Stripers are where you find them," he said. "They could be anywhere."

But our primary goal was to get into smallmouth. And we did! Most of the fish did not exceed two pounds, but all were ruby-eyed battlers who attacked our 1/8-ounce chartreuse jigs eagerly. Sometimes with a vengeance, sometimes with subtle seduction, but all hungrily. The best technique was to "crawl" the jig over the bottom rocks as slowly as possible while keeping the offering moving enough to prevent it from dropping into snags. When fishing brush we rigged Carolina style, with the hook barb embedded in soft plastic. Setting the hook required a hard pull. One had to keep a finger on the mono to be ready.

My most exciting trip to Powell, however, was a recent one with Steve Partridge, of Spanish Fork, who has devoted his life to making and fishing with jigs of all sizes, shapes and colors. His basement is so covered with jigs, I had to be careful where I stepped.

We put in at Hite in early May, on the upper end of the lake, and although we had to maneuver around incoming logs and debris from the Colorado River, it was worth the trouble. After working around the obstacles for several miles, we broke free and made camp on a sandbar near the mouth of Farley Canyon. Nearby, Steve cast a small, red-head and silver jig toward shore, let it sink, and twitched it alongside the boulders in water about 10 to 15 feet deep. His rod tip was seldom limp. His counsel to me: "Cast where the gold-hued water meets the green. Then make it look like a crayfish bumbling along." Five of the fish he caught that morning included respectable walleye.

In the afternoon, our rod tips bounced repeatedly. We found a school of striped bass that would hit anything that moved. Within three hours we'd caught dozens, ranging from 16 inches to six pounds. By putting anchovies on the bottom, I also caught two channel catfish. Our best luck with the stripers was with a large, silver jig tipped with anchovy. The amazing thing to me was where we found this school of stripers: not alongside a deep, main-channel dropoff, where I'd been told these "water wolves" roam, but in a back bay near Red Canyon, in less than 20 feet of water. And once a feeding frenzy is started, hungry stripers don't quit quickly.

Incidentally, I think many anglers get bad advice on this species. For example, I was once warned that to catch stripers, my only hope was to fish at night, with bait from a boat. My first 6-pound stripers came at midday while I was fishing from the bank using a silver Garland jig. The rule with this species is that you ignore all rules. Never stop experimenting.

But the fish I catch here most consistently is the smallmouth. After supper, with Steve's 18-foot inboard beached for the day, I caught many smallies by twitching a chartreuse jig along bankside boulders. I'm not certain why black bass love chartreuse, as do walleyes. Studies do show that chartreuse (and blue) are readily seen in deep, murky water, above even bright colors such as red or yellow. The waters of Powell are usually clear, of course, but anytime winds churn up sandy coves you want to put a lure there. Such action signals game fish that food ensconced on the bottom, such as crayfish or aquatic insects, will be stirred up by wave action; thus, food forms become highly vulnerable. My favorite "hot spot" of all is "edge" water where clear meets mudline.

Frequently, I rig a 1/32-ounce jig above my larger offering, in the hope of attracting green sunfish or bluegill. There are some large ones in Powell, particularly in the back of warm bays, and I've taken many doubles, hand-sized "panfish" on top, black bass on the bottom rig. Two sizeable bass will give your arm a good workout.

Can a bank fisherman score at Powell? Yes, under certain circumstances. In the evening one of my favorite practices is to fish the boat docks. At Bullfrog Marina, I asked the operator if this was permitted. His answer: "Certainly! I'm a fisherman myself and catch some of my best bass off artificial structure." This includes the windbreaker tire reefs near the wakeless speed zones just outside the marina area. One can also dangle a lure or jig beneath the shoreline rock piles near campgrounds and lodges. My usual catch in such places is a small bass, but one day from bank I landed a 5-pound largemouth that hit a number 7 Rebel plug. On occasion in the spring when bluegill are spawning, I've caught and released dozens via fly rod using a small black fly.

The explosion of smallmouth bass at Powell is a singular success story, which indicates that fisheries biology is not always an exact science. Rainbow trout and largemouth bass were the first plants in this lake, some 35 years ago. The rainbows didn't take. They held to deep, cold water after the first year, becoming increasingly difficult to find during the spring and summer. Largemouth also declined, until fishing was at a low ebb in the 1970s. It was when Gustaveson introduced smallmouth that the great fishing began. The smallies were better adapted to deep rock structure than the moss bed-inclined shallow water largemouth.

But Micropterus dolomieui grow slowly; sizeable smallies didn't show up for some six to seven years. It's been some 15 years now, and, in my opinion, the lake's black bass fishing has never been better. The future looks particularly bright.

Striped bass? Being so dependent upon threadfin shad, striper fortunes vary. They rise and fall with the shad population, causing a cycle of boom and bust. Threadfin are on a gradual decline this year, but hopefully, when the stripers thin out, the shad will come back.

Some of my most memorable trips to Powell have come during trips when I've taken my entire family on a houseboat. Fortunately, a good time to reserve a boat is when fishing is best, in spring and fall. During summer heat, swimmers and skiers (with an accompanying outboard runabout) take over. But any time you can get a houseboat is a good time to rent one. If not fishing, you can explore the magnificent crimson and orange shoreline of this rambling lake, find solitude at the end of a bay, hike nearby canyons, lie on the beach, photograph the scenic wonders (careful not to overexpose with all that light bouncing from water to cliff!), and just generally relax in a tranquil setting. Everyone in the family, from children to teenagers to grandparents, can find their niche.

The elements sometimes conspire, making it difficult to follow my Lake Powell battle plan. (A sudden squall can make fishing inconvenient when you are in a small, open boat.) But, in my dozens of trips to Powell, I've always been able to adjust, and I've never really had a poor trip. Sometimes cold fronts make me go deeper for bass; but, even when fishing is slow, you can't really have a bad day on such a resplendent water.

For information on angling regulations, see the Utah and Arizona fishing proclamations. Utah anglers can fish on the Arizona side if they purchase an Arizona stamp, available at all lake marinas.

Wayne Gustaveson maintains an excellent web site with current fishing reports and tips, plus an extensive amount of general information about the lake: www.wayneswords.com. You can listen to his report by calling the "Ask Fish" service, (800) 275-3474, and progressing through the menus. If you want a guide, try Chris Shipley's Broken Arrow Guide Service (www.brokenarrowfishing.com), out of Page, Ariz., which is licensed to guide on Powell (emphasizing bass and striped bass), and on the river at Lees Ferry (for rainbow trout).

See the Powell houseboating feature in this issue for more on reservations, rentals etc.

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