California’s Highway 62 heading east from the town of Twentynine Palms is the straightest section of desert highway I’ve ever seen — straight as a guitar string for as far as the eye can see, through the land of Joshua trees into the heart of the Mojave Desert toward Arizona. However, after a few hours of monotonous driving, the austere high desert landscape changes dramatically as you near Lake Havasu: red sandstone cliffs come into view, then the bright green corridor of the Colorado River appears. Wild burros often can be spotted by the roadside. At Parker Dam, Lake Havasu presents itself, a turquoise oasis in this vast arid land, home to over 340 species of birds, along with over fifty thousand human inhabitants who live in Lake Havasu City, located at the midpoint of Havasu’s eastern shoreline.
Lake Havasu straddles the California/Arizona border, with the eastern shoreline in Arizona and the western shoreline in California. Parker Dam was completed in 1938, creating a Colorado River impoundment over 45 miles long, from Parker Dam at the south end to the
Topock Gorge at the north end. If you include the entire Topock Gorge, Lake Havasu offers over 60 miles of continuous, navigable waterway. Long and narrow, Havasu is less than 3 miles wide at its widest point, with an average depth of 35 feet and a maximum depth of 90 feet. Before white settlers arrived, the area was home for the Mojave tribe of Native Americans. “Havasu” is the Mojave word for “blue.” Living on the banks of the mighty Colorado, the Mojave depended on its never-ending, life-sustaining f low in an otherwise inhospitable, parched desert.
In his book California Fishing, Tom Stienstra describes Lake Havasu as “a lone sapphire in a vast field of coal.” And what a gem it is. Cruising the lake in a boat for the first time, I was struck by the ultraclear water and its beguiling hues in every shade of blue.
Lake Havasu is one of the premier desert reservoirs in the West, with a wide variety of fish available to the fly fisher. Pro bass angler Joe Uribe, Jr., who won the Western Outdoor News Bass Arizona Open at Havasu in 2022, sums up Havasu’s diverse appeal, not just to conventional anglers, but to fly fishers as well: “It’s a phenomenal fishery and one of the top 10 lakes out west. It has smallmouth and largemouth, and one thing that really makes it unique is the Department of Fish and Game does a great job maintaining the lake with man-made structure. They do that on an annual basis: brush piles, cages, pipes, and tubes for many different species like catfish, baitfish, bluegill and redear. It’s a very healthy fishery. Also, a river flows into it, so anglers can go north and fish shallow tributaries and backwaters with a lot of tules, wood, and current. Or they can stay in the main body where the Arizona side is more shallow, sandy, and grassy, while the California side has lava rock, steeper banks, and bluffs.”
London Bridge
Strange as it may seem, you can’t really begin to talk about the fishing at Lake Havasu without first talking about London Bridge, Lake Havasu City’s main attraction. Bringing it there from London was the brainchild of Robert McCulloch, a millionaire who made his fortune in the boat motor and lightweight personal chainsaw business. McCulloch needed a site to test his boat motors, so in 1958, he purchased 3,353 acres on Havasu’s shoreline at Pittsburg Point. In 1963, he purchased an additional 26-squaremile parcel on the lake’s eastern shore for $75 per acre, the parcel that later would become Lake Havasu City.
Then in 1967, the city of London put the London Bridge up for auction, after the 136-year-old stone bridge was deemed too dangerous for the increasing amount of automobile traffic, which was causing it to sink slowly into the River Thames. McCulloch seized the opportunity with the idea to create a vacation hot spot centered on London Bridge as a tourist attraction. He partnered with Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, who designed Disneyland’s Main Street, to plan and create Lake Havasu City.
In 1968, McCulloch bought the bridge for $2,460,000. Its 10,276 blocks were removed, numbered, then shipped overseas via the Panama Canal to the Port of Long Beach and trucked overland to Lake Havasu City at a total cost of another $7,000,000. Using copies of the architectural diagrams from 1824, a crew of 40 men meticulously reassembled the bridge, block by block, between 1968 and 1971, first constructing an improved internal support structure of steel-reinforced concrete, adding strength while reducing the weight of the bridge by nearly a hundred thousand tons. The bridge was fully assembled on dry land, then a channel was dredged beneath the bridge, creating an island at Pittsburg Point. As a finishing touch, the bridge’s walkways were adorned with the original bridge’s vintage lampposts, made from the melted-down cannons of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army seized by the British after Napoleon’s defeat in the 1815 Battle of Waterloo.
McCulloch died in 1977 at the age of 66, before his vision fully reached fruition. When it did, London Bridge became Arizona’s greatest man-made tourist attraction, traversed by thousands every year, and Lake Havasu City became one the country’s most popular spring break destinations.
And for anglers, that’s the problem. London Bridge Island would become the magnet for ten thousand boats full of inebriated spring breakers in various stages of nakedness undulating to blaring music, and unfortunately, the months of spring break, March and April, coincide with some the best fishing, as does Memorial Day weekend, another bacchanalia. Even if it’s not spring break, if you fish Lake Havasu from a boat, beware — it is one of the deadliest bodies of water in the country for boat and jet ski accidents, facilitated by a lethal combination of high speed, incompetence, and intoxication.
Consequently, the first thing anyone contemplating taking advantage of Lake Havasu’s many fishing opportunities needs to do is to distance yourself as far as possible from London Bridge, which is located roughly midway along the eastern shoreline. The farther away you get, the less likely you are to be buzzed by random high-speed boaters or joyriding jet skiers.
Safe Zones
Fortunately, there are several safe zones. The northernmost section of the lake is within the confines of the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge. To protect important migratory bird habitat, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge by executive order in 1941. The refuge is an essential part of the Pacific Flyway, a major migratory stopover for hundreds of species of birds along the western coast of the United States. Many species overwinter and breed there.
At the northernmost point of the lake, the Colorado River flows into Topock Gorge, a spectacular red-rock canyon that is considered one of the last remaining natural stretches of the lower Colorado River. In the confines of the gorge, the lake resembles a wide, slow river that has flooded its banks. The main channel flows with considerable current, and stripers can be found during the warmer months hanging out at the channel edges or in the deeper holes where the old river channel makes a tight bend. In the shallower water, the side channels, flats, and tule-lined coves offer excellent fishing for largemouth bass.
At the south end of the lake is the Bill Williams River National Wildlife Refuge. The Bill Williams River flows into Lake Havasu only during floods. Usually, the backwaters from Havasu fill the old river channel, which is lined with dense groves of cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, this 6,100-acre refuge contains “one of the last stands of naturally regenerated cottonwood willow forests along the lower Colorado River.” The river corridor attracts a diversity of wildlife species, including foxes, coyotes, deer, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions. Turtles and beavers frolic in the water, and muskrats, raccoons, and ring-tailed cats frequent the riverbanks. Three different river segments, totaling over 21 miles, have been designated as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers system, due to their remarkable scenery and recreational opportunities, which include fishing and wildlife observation.
The largemouth bass fishing can be excellent there, especially at the edges of the tules where the old river channel enters the lake. There, you can launch a float tube, canoe, or personal watercraft at the Visitor Center and work the edges of the river mouth’s tules for largemouth bass. In the spring, fishing for crappies can be excellent in the mid-depths of the slightly deeper water. In the spring to early summer, striped bass fishing is good throughout the southern area of the lake just north of the Bill Williams River inlet. The stripers tend to suspend above deeper water just off the shoreline shelves.
One of my favorite areas to float tube, and an exception to the London Bridge distancing rule, is Mesquite Bay North, located only a few miles north of London Bridge, reached by driving north on London Bridge Road, 1.7 miles past the Industrial Road turnoff. Here you can launch a float tube, kayak, or canoe just a few feet from your car and ply the waters of three massive coves, closed to motorized watercraft and protected from the dicey boaters in the main lake by a boundary marked with buoys. Fishing these coves is a surreal experience, juxtaposed with the sound of some of the loudest and most powerful speedboats on the planet pushing the envelope just for the thrill of it. Mesquite Bay North has acres of flats with extensive underwater structure, excellent habitat for smallmouths, largemouths, bluegills, redear sunfish, channel catfish, and carp.
Habitat Improvement
Just as Robert McCulloch turned a part of the Mojave Desert into a city by the lake, volunteers from Anglers United, along with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the US Bureau of Land Management, the Arizona Department of Fish and Game, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Geological Service have worked to improve the lake itself as a home for gamefish species. In a 10-year effort, they worked together to establish over 800 acres of artificial habitat in 42 coves throughout the lake. According to the Lake Havasu City Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Lake Havasu Habitat Partnership, which began in 1992, is “one of the largest and most successful fish habitat improvement projects ever undertaken in the US . . . a shining example of what can be accomplished when government natural resource agencies, anglers, and interested members of the public and private sector companies work together on behalf of fishing.” By 2010, these improvement efforts began to achieve tangible results, and in 2014 Bassmaster magazine rated Lake Havasu as one of the top 20 bass lakes in the country.
McCulloch built houses; the partnership built “fish condos,” rectangular and cylindrical structures made from plastic fencing material, stacked in massive piles next to and on top of each other, and “catfish houses,” stacks of pipes capped on one end. It also planted “fish’n forests,” 9-to-15-foot lengths of plastic stalks with two plastic “leaves” at each foot in height, and erected “ bass shelters,” massive, 30-by-20-by-20-foot-high rolled plastic pyramid-shaped structures. Ongoing maintenance of these habitat improvements consists of the placement of 80 huge brush piles (collected from local landscapers) that are bundled and weighed down with sandbags and placed around the artificial habitat on a monthly basis. Like many bodies of water, Lake Havasu has been infested with quagga mussels, but even that has worked out well with regard to these habitat improvements for fish, because the artificial structures became covered in mussels, and the fish were even more attracted to them, since they appeared more natural.
The Lake Havasu Fishing Map by Fish-n-Map details the locations of the artificial habitat, with GPS coordinates, including the location of each specific type of enhancement. (See the “If You Go . . .” sidebar.) In Havasu’s crystal-clear water, the fish condos and bass shelters can be easily spotted in the shallow coves, looking like submerged shipwrecks. In my experience float tubing Mesquite Bay North, whenever I saw underwater artificial structure, I saw fish near it: big channel cats and dinner-plate-sized redear sunfish. Fishing icon Al Linder says the enhancement efforts have been “like a homeless project for the fish,” with “absolutely incredible results.”
In 2015, Arizona fish biologist Russ Engel declared the fishing at Havasu was “phenomenal” and that the lake was in “the best condition in 40 years.” During an electroshocking survey, over three nights 2,300 fish were counted. Eighty percent of these fish were forage fish, with the remainder mainly stripers, smallmouth bass, and largemouth bass. Engel surmised that “The large number of threadfin shad and other forage fish is the main factor for the health of the fishery.”
Fishing Havasu
If I had to pick one pattern that catches the most species at Lake Havasu, it would be a size 6 to 10 Woolly Bugger, fished on a slow-sinking intermediate line. An intermediate line allows you to fish effectively from the shallows down to about 15 feet. I tie my Woolly Buggers with a purple, green, or blue glass bead head and about 15 wraps of .010inch lead or equivalent nontoxic wire, a black or olive marabou tail with a few strands of Krystal Flash, and two size 12 or 14 black or olive dry-fly hackles palmered over blue-green dubbing. I also tie a few with heavier wire or a brass or tungsten bead head. On this one pattern I’ve caught stripers, largemouths, smallmouths, channel catfish, carp, redears, and bluegills.
A boat will get you to more places faster, and allow you to cover more water, but a float tube or personal watercraft is a more intimate way to fish the lake. From a boat, you can explore the Topock Gorge at the northern end of the lake, with all its wonderful backwaters, or you can fish the multitude of coves on the southern end, with the option of camping at one of the many primitive boat campsites along the Arizona shoreline between Lake Havasu City and Parker Dam. The California (west) shoreline is closed to camping. For float tubing or fishing from a nonmotorized personal watercraft near the Lake Havasu city environs, it’s hard to beat Mesquite Bay North’s convenient access and user-friendly launch area and its protected, motor-free zone not far from the London Bridge hub.
Stripers, bass, and redear sunfish are probably the fish of most interest to flyrodders at Havasu, but if you’re trolling and twitching a streamer on a sinking line right off the bottom and you feel a massive tug, chances are it might be a catfish. Both channel and bullhead catfish live there. The largest bullhead caught at Havasu weighed 60 pounds.
Havasu’s Stripers
Striped bass, imported from the East Coast, were introduced to Lake Havasu in 1959. Fueled by vast schools of baitfish, they thrived in the big lake’s clean, clear water and temperate climate. By the 1970s, fish over 30 pounds were being caught, and in 2015, Dennis Watson brought to hand a 44-inch striper that weighed 36-1/4 pounds.
In the winter, the fish hunker down in the old river channel in the center of the lake and in the deeper water at the lake’s southern end near Parker Dam. By March, as water temperatures rise, they begin migrating north, and by May, they’re available throughout the lake, all the way north to Topock Gorge. Unlike smallmouths and largemouths, striped bass spawn in moving water and don’t build redds.
Stripers often hold on rocky shelves adjacent to deeper water and along deep drop-offs adjacent to weeds or rocky structure that hold food sources. At places where the old river channel makes a sharp bend, there is often a deeper hole with an underwater cliff — a striper hot spot.
A barely perceptible current f lows from north to south throughout the main part of the lake, and the stripers often will face into the current, positioned off the points and drop-offs to ambush any baitfish that come their way. Anchoring a boat off drop-offs and points adjacent to the main channel and casting a full sinking line (five to six inches per second sink rate) with a baitfish pattern is a good tactic. A pattern with dumbbell eyes, such as a Clouser Minnow, will help sink your fly quickly, and weighted patterns jigged deep often produce the best results in this scenario. Some of the most productive spots for stripers are Site Six, off London Bridge Island, Pilot Rock and The Narrows, Blakenship Bend at the north end of the lake, and on the southern end of the lake, Cottonwood Cove at Cattail Cove State Park, Havasu Springs, and the entire Bill Williams River arm. Chumming with bits of anchovy out in the current is a common strategy to lure the fish to an anchored position.
Stripers prowl the lake in voracious packs to hunt threadfin shad, the lake’s primary forage fish. It’s rare to find a shad boil by happenstance, though. You are more likely to find shad boils by carefully scouting with binoculars, looking for birds feeding on baitfish busting the surface to evade the predatory stripers attacking from below. A trolling motor is essential to follow the frenzied activity for as long as possible without spooking the fish, as is your ability to double haul and make long casts. Let your fly sink below the melee, then strip the fly erratically to mimic a wounded baitfish. I’d recommend at least a 12-pound tippet, because stripers over 20 pounds are not uncommon, and the bites are ferocious.
Summer air temperatures frequently soar to over 100 degrees here, but at such times, stripers often can still be found busting the surface chasing the baitfish early and late in the day. By 9:00 a.m., however, the boat traffic usually will send the stripers to deeper water, and the bite is over.
With cooling autumn temperatures, the stripers become hyperactive in their zeal to devour shad. From September into November is the most consistent time for targeting stripers near the surface. Good shad imitations for this time of year include Enrico Puglisi’s Grey Shad in size 1/0 and Blane Chocklett’s 2.75-inch-long Mini Finesse Game Changer.
None of the local guides specialize in fly fishing, but they keep tabs on the whereabouts of the fish and can get you to the prime spots if you work out the logistics of fly fishing with them.
Havasu’s Bass
Thriving populations of both largemouth and smallmouth bass inhabit Lake Havasu. The smallmouths are attracted to rocky points and flats with boulders, to a rocky bottom, and to artificial structure. At Mesquite Bay North, just south of the personal watercraft launching area, there is a large, rocky point— a great spot to target smallmouths.
Smallmouths tend to hang out in slightly deeper water than largemouths, usually 10 to 20 feet deep, and respond well to a slow, twitching retrieve, whereas largemouths are usually found shallower and respond better to a fly stripped in quick, short bursts. The largemouths gravitate to tule edges and shoreline aquatic vegetation, particularly in the backs of coves. They also can reliably be found adjacent to dock structures.
With the ultraclear water, sight-fishing opportunities for spawning bass begin in February with smallmouths, followed soon thereafter by the largemouths in March. The smallmouths spawn on gravelly bottoms, and their beds can be identified by darker, pebbly concentric areas several feet in diameter. Any weighted fly bounced through their bed will elicit a response, but it’s tough to beat a crawfish pattern. Smallmouths average around three pounds, and fish over five pounds have been caught lately on a regular basis. In February 2017, Sue Nowak caught a 21-inch smallmouth that weighed six and a quarter pounds.
Largemouths spawn over somewhat sandier bottoms, often adjacent to tules in several feet of water. In the warmer months, the top-water action for largemouths can be great early or late in the day. Casting a popper or deer-hair diver with a weed guard on a floating line into gaps in the shoreline vegetation is a good strategy.
Havasu’s Redear Sunfish
Redear sunfish can be identified by their black gill flap with an orange border at the tip. In recent years, redears over five pounds have been caught on a regular basis, putting Havasu on the map as the top destination for trophy-sized redear sunfish.
Redears are called “shellcrackers” in the South because of their preferred diet of mollusks. They have small teeth in their throat (called pharyngeal teeth) that allow them to crush shells. Fish biologists theorize that the abnormal growth rate of Havasu redears is mainly due to the presence of the invasive quagga mussel. Indigenous to Ukraine, quagga mussels first invaded the Great Lakes and then colonized many Colorado River reservoirs, including Lake Havasu.
Even before the quagga mussels colonized the lake, the Havasu redears grew to relatively large sizes, compared with those in most lakes. According to Doug Adams, a former Havasu fisheries biologist, in 2005, an electroshocking survey of 75 sites revealed that Havasu redears averaged two pounds. Two years later, quagga mussels proliferated at Havasu, and in 2011, Robert Lawler caught a five-pound, eight-ounce redear that raised eyebrows, an ounce heavier than the existing IGFA world record redear caught in South Carolina in 1998.
The US Bureau of Reclamation conducted both laboratory and field experiments to determine if in fact bluegills and redear sunfish were eating quagga mussels. They placed enclosures in the lake and monitored them, concluding that the sunfish reduced the population of the quagga mussels in the study area by 25 percent, but “are not likely to eradicate quagga mussels where the two species co-occur.”
Crayfish also eat quagga mussels, and in turn, redears love to eat crayfish. Redears also feast on an abundant supply of grass shrimp. With this protein-rich diet, the shellcrackers have flourished, reaching downright porcine dimensions, often girthier than their length, attaining sizes unheard of anywhere else in the country.
On February 16, 2014, Hector Brito was fishing for bass with a night crawler, midway on the western side of the lake near the Chalk Cliffs, when he hooked up, and based on the line-peeling run the fish was making, guessed that he had connected with a catfish or maybe a striper. Much to his surprise, he landed a new world record redear sunfish that weighed in at a whopping five pounds, twelve ounces. The fish was shaped like an overinflated football, 17 inches long with an astonishing girth of 19.5 inches.
Seven years later, on May 4, 2021, Thomas Farchione landed an even bigger redear, the largest one ever recorded: 17 inches long with a remarkable girth of 20 inches, weighing in at six pounds, four ounces, the current IGFA world record.
Redears, being bottom feeders, usually hold in deeper water than most sunfish, 15 to 30 feet deep, except during the spawn. Starting in April, they migrate into the shallows, building their nests in the quiet water in the backs of coves and among the cattails. These nests are usually extensive, seen in the clear water as clusters of circular, lighter-colored bottom, formed by scouring of the bottom to reveal gravel and pieces of shell. From a boat, it’s easy to spot the nests if the sun is out, but a stealthy approach is required. If the fish sense the presence of your boat, they’ll often hunker down with a serious case of lockjaw. Scanning the shallows through polarized sunglasses (I prefer an amber tint) with the sun at your back will reveal not only the beds, but the fish, allowing you to target the bigger ones.
At Mesquite Bay North, in the back of one of the coves, while kicking around in my float tube, I happened upon a huge colony of nesting redears. Once I located the spot, I backed up as far away as I could and still see and cast into the beds. It was a fun afternoon of catch-and-release fishing. These fish couldn’t resist a small (size 12) olive or black Woolly Bugger. I used a clear, slow-sinking intermediate line and just let the fly sink slowly down over the bed. On most casts, I was hooked up before I even began stripping.
In summary, at Lake Havasu it’s often a surprise when you find out what’s tugging on the end of your line. This Southern California impoundment offers uncrowded water in a splendid environment, with a wide variety of fish species, and your next catch could be a 10-inch bass or a 10-pound catfish, a 30-inch striper or a 5-pound sunfish.
Havasu and Drought
A prolonged 20-year drought has had a significant effect on the entire Colorado system and its reservoirs. Lake Mead and Lake Powell have dropped to about 30 percent of capacity. California’s Metropolitan Water District has the largest entitlement for the water from these reservoirs. That water then flows into Lake Havasu, which stores it for 19 million customers in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, and Ventura Counties. Fortunately for Havasu, which serves as a “balancing reservoir,” its water level has remained consistently high, even through the drought, varying less than five feet annually and staying close to 98 percent capacity, even in the summer. In the future, who gets the water will become more and more of an issue, but for now, Havasu’s water level continues to remain consistently high, keeping both the anglers and the fish happy.
— Bob Gaines
If You Go…
Fishing Licenses
Lake Havasu straddles the California/Arizona border, and recently, the two states entered into a reciprocal license agreement so that an angler who has either a valid California or Arizona fishing license is permitted to fish anywhere on Lake Havasu, including both the California and Arizona shorelines.
Fishing Map
For an indispensable fishing map of the lake, which includes locations of all the various underwater fish habitat enhancement structures, check out the Lake Havasu fishing map by Fish-n-Map, available for $14.95 at https://www.fishnmap.com/item.php?item=795.
Camping
Within Lake Havasu City, just north of London Bridge, Lake Havasu State Park offers RV campsites for $35 per night ($40 for shoreline sites) and primitive shoreline cabins for $119. The campground provides water and electricity, has showers and restrooms, and the sites include picnic tables, fire pits, and shade structures, along with RV hookups. Reservations can be made at www.azstateparks.com/reserve/#lake-havasu/camping or by calling the Arizona State Parks Reservations Desk at 1-877-MY PARKS (697-2757).
Cattail Cove State Park, located in the south end of the lake on the Arizona side, offers 61 camping and RV sites. The sites have electricity, water, picnic tables, and barbeque/fire pits. Reservations can be made at www.azstateparks.com/ reserve/#cattail-cove/camping or by calling the Arizona State Parks Reservations Desk at 1-877-MY PARKS (697-2757).
Boat Camping
On the southern half of the lake, on the Arizona (east) side, the US Bureau of Land Management and Arizona State Parks offer 53 different primitive boat camping areas with a total of 118 individual sites, available on a first-come, firstserved basis for a modest fee (usually $10). Most sites include picnic tables, barbeque grills, shade structures, pit toilets, and trash cans. A downloadable PDF map of the sites is available at https://www.golakehavasu.com/media/media-14123.pdf. No shoreline camping is available on the California side.
— Bob Gaines
