I finally picked a good day to fish San Luis Reservoir. Although the temps reached 100 degrees by noon, the lake winds were mild at worst and dead flat most of the time. Last year at this time, the Trash racks were a sure thing for school stripers in 20-30 feet of water. The Water levels are now at pretty fishable levels (about 60 feet down from capacity though) and the boat ramp at basalt is good. I called up my buddy Rick Pilgrim and told him to be at my house at 4:00am for the 5:30 sunrise. We got to the Basalt gate at 5:15 and it was CLOSED! I thought the gates opened automatically an hour before sunrise but I was told the park hours are 6AM to 6PM despite the sunrise and sunset. We were the first ones on the lake and headed over to Portuguese Cove looking for busting fish. None were to be found. After making 100 casts with all sorts of top water and sinking flies, Rick picked up one fish for the morning. It was slow! At 10am we headed over to Bay of Pigs and worked the bay in 30 feet of water with no luck. We headed to the trash racks to look for schools of shad to play with but the shad were not up against the shore and we could see them busting on the surface periodically while they were speeding around in front of the trash racks. Even the Pelicans were tired of chasing them as they were sitting on the points heckling us as we sped from surface break to surface break. We couldn’t get a fly in front of the shad even with spinning gear but we saw them on the meter deep as well. A boat using live grass shrimp was doing a little better on the stripers in front of the thrash racks.

Oh well, the lake still is abusing me. I’m getting tired of making video logs of bad days. No fish for months. I hope the Fall is as good as it was last year. I need a double digit day to get the jinx off. At least Richard caught one. I think at times like this, I need to go back and hit the forebay. The weeds are thick and weed lines are distinct. At least there, I can target habitat better.

I ate that one fish and noticed it was not very well fed though it had shoulders. The stomach contents consisted of very small 1/2 inch minnows and a couple one inch shrimp. No big minnows. The shrimp appeared to be native–I couldn’t find any hook holes in them. but they could have been chummed. They certainly were some of the biggest shrimp I’ve seen out of the lake.