Spring fishing at Lake Perris can be exciting. It was a 70-degree bluebird spring day when I launched my float tube and glided into Lake Perris’s northernmost bay. After 15 minutes of steadily kicking with my swim fins, I paused and looked around. A single white cloud drifted in the azure sky, and yellow flowers blanketed the surrounding hillsides. A slight breeze rippled the lake’s surface, and an acrobatic tern cavorted erratically, stalled briefly, then dive-bombed into the water, emerging with a small baitfish. Anticipation hung in the air like a hovering osprey, head down, eyes piercing the water.
Plan A was to find where my favorite Perris quarry, the common carp, were hanging out, and I scanned the water, looking for signs of mudding fish. When a mushroom cloud of silt boiled up to the surface, I slowly backed up 50 feet and began casting. I figured I was in about ten feet of water, so I patiently counted down the slow-sinking intermediate line until I was sure my weighted Woolly Bugger was near the bottom, then slowly pulled the line tight and began a series of rapid, two-inch strips. Nothing. I cast again and let the fly sink a little deeper. After a few strips, there was a massive, jolting strike. I strip-set the hook and immediately felt powerful, back-and-forth head shakes. As I raised my rod, the fish took off, ripping the line out of my stripping hand. The reel was zinging and the backing dwindling as the fish ran toward the middle of the bay.
But there was a problem. It was a low-water year, and the fish was making a beeline for a pile of submerged trees poking up through the surface. I tightened my drag, and as the fish entered the snags, I palmed the reel, noticing the backing was down to the Arbor Knot attaching it to the reel. So I kicked my fins furiously, backing up, and somehow pulled the fish out of harm’s way. It turned and ran in the opposite direction, toward shore, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I settled in for a half-hour tug of war, working the butt section of my 6-weight, kicking toward shore, but the fish was powerful enough to tow me around in my float tube. As soon as I was in shallow enough water, I jumped out of my tube to gain firm footing. I carry a big rubber net that I rarely use, but it’s for situations just like this. Just before I landed the fish, I finally got my first look at it.
It was a catfish — a channel catfish with nine-inch barbels, and it weighed in at 23 pounds. One of the things that makes fishing at Lake Perris exciting is that you never know what’s going to show up at the end of your line: carp, bass, bluegills, sunfish — even giant catfish.
The Creation of a World Record Fishery
Located in Riverside County, the Lake Perris State Recreation Area is ringed by sagebrush mountains that isolate the lake basin from the urban sprawl and surrounding cities of Perris and Moreno Valley, home to a quarter of a million people.
Lake Perris was born in 1974 when a two-mile-long dam was built, impounding water from the California Aqueduct, forming a reservoir to provide drinking water for Southern California. It has 3.7 miles of surface area, 10 miles of shoreline, and a maximum depth of 100 feet.
Ken Aasen, a fisheries biologist with what was then the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG), now the Department of Fish and Wildlife, was presented with a unique opportunity — to create a recreational fishery from scratch. Aasen intended to replicate the fishery of Lewis Smith Lake in Alabama, which produced the largest spotted bass in the country at the time and would later (in 1978) yield the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) world record at 8 pounds, 15 ounces.
In 1974, 94 Alabama spotted bass were planted in Lake Perris, along with green sunfish as a forage base for the bass. In the temperate Southern California climate, the spotted bass flourished, feasting on the sunfish and a burgeoning population of crayfish, growing to sizes surpassing their Alabama brethren. The initial planting seeded the genesis of what would become a world record fishery for spotted bass. In the 1980s, numerous IGFA line-class world records were caught at Perris, and in 1987, Perris produced a new IGFA world record spotted bass, a fish that weighed 9 pounds, 4 ounces, caught by Steve West on 6-pound-test line. But two things happened in the 1980s that led to the demise of this world-class fishery. Florida-strain largemouth bass, likely introduced via livewells from San Diego County bass anglers, began to compete with the spotted bass for territory. Then the DFG planted Florida-strain bluegills, which quickly multiplied into a huge population.
At first, the largemouths were blamed for the decline of the spotted bass, but fish biologists conducting dive studies near the dam noticed something peculiar. The spotted bass were very poor defenders of their spawning nests, preyed upon not by the largemouths, but by the bluegills. Unlike the largemouths, whose males dutifully guard their nest, the spotted bass would vacate their nest after a short period of time, leaving it undefended. The Florida-strain bluegills, being fierce little predators, gobbled up their eggs and viciously attacked and ate all their fry. By the mid-1990s, Alabama spotted bass were extinct in Lake Perris.
In 2011, the American Fisheries Society reclassified the Alabama spotted bass as its own species, the Alabama bass, leaving only two species of spotted bass: the northern spotted bass (also called the Kentucky spotted bass, but native to Texas) and the Wichita spotted bass.
In 2017, the new IGFA world record Alabama bass, weighing 11 pounds, 4 ounces, was caught at New Bullards Bar Reservoir in Northern California, and the Lake Perris Alabama spotted bass became a distant memory.
Largemouth Bass
Since they first showed up in the 1980s, Florida-strain largemouth bass flourished in Lake Perris, as they have in most large Southern California reservoirs. The same conditions that fostered the record-breaking spotted bass fishery produced football-shaped largemouths. The temperate winter climate, combined with clear, clean reservoir water, fostered a fertile aquatic environment that produced a smorgasbord of rich food sources, including crayfish, scuds, dragonfly nymphs, and vast schools of baitfish, supplemented by perhaps the greatest protein source of all — rainbow trout, planted courtesy of the DFG. The Florida-strain largemouth bass in California quickly grew to sizes far larger than their counterparts in Florida.
In fact, 18 of the 25 largest Florida-strain largemouth bass of all time were caught in California, all over 19 pounds. The lake record largemouth bass for Perris, caught by Dan Hoover in April 2012, weighed 18.5 pounds.
The largemouth fishing at Perris picks up in mid to late February, when the water begins to warm into the high 50s and the bass are in their prespawn phase. Working the deep drop-offs with a big Game Changer or Clouser Minnow on an intermediate or full sinking line is a good tactic, as is crawling a big, wormlike fly right along the bottom. The fish are a bit lethargic this early in the spring, so a slow retrieve is preferred. By March, the water warms into the 60s, and the bass move into shallower water.
Action heats up in the 5-to-10-foot-deep zone. Fishing a size 4 or 6 Woolly Bugger on an intermediate line can be deadly this time of year, especially when the fly is trolled or stripped slowly, right off the bottom.
When the water temperature hits 65 degrees, it’s spawning time. At Perris, the largemouths spawn in water from 2 to 10 feet deep, and their spawning nests are easily identified by clusters of 3-to 4-foot-diameter light-colored areas on the bottom, usually tight to aquatic structure and vegetation. For a period of three to four weeks, the bass will be on and off their spawning beds, sometimes pushing off into deeper water if a cold front moves through.
In the clear water, sight fishing is possible. You’ll commonly find the males, averaging about two pounds, guarding the nests. The larger females are usually nearby, in deeper water, making brief forays into the spawning area to deposit eggs. The largemouths aren’t actively feeding this time of year, but will aggressively strike a fly out of aggravation.
When sight fishing, a sinking white fly allows you to see the location of your fly and the fish’s reaction to it, which is often an immediate strike, if the bass doesn’t sense your presence, so a stealthy approach is important. Once a bass senses you’re there, it usually won’t spook and swim away. Rather, it’ll just hunker down and get a serious case of lockjaw.
To fish for bass on their beds when they’re spawning is a personal, ethical decision. It’s not legal in some states. From what I’ve seen, if you play them quickly and handle them carefully, they seem no worse for wear and quickly return to their business.
However, I prefer to avoid the fickle spawners and wait for the prime-time postspawn phase. Now the fish are ready to get down to some serious eating, aggressively feeding on anything they can ambush. Gray-and-white baitfish imitations such as Chocklett’s Mini Finesse Game Changer, 2.75 inches long, work well after the spawn, imitating the largemouth’s favorite forage fish, the threadfin shad.
By late April and early May, water temperatures are heading into the 70s, and extensive weed beds begin growing in the shallows. The warmer temperatures trigger prolific hatches of damselflies and dragonflies. An olive Woolly Bugger or damselfly nymph in size 10, stripped along the edges of the weed beds, is deadly at this time of year. If you can find a wall of weeds adjacent to a deeper drop-off, you’ve likely found a hot spot. Cast and strip parallel to the weed wall, or if you’re in a float tube, cast and slowly troll parallel to it.
If someone tells you that you can’t catch big bass on small flies, don’t believe them. My three biggest largemouths at Perris, weighing 7, 7.5, and 8 pounds, were all caught on size 10 or 12 flies.
The month of June can produce outstanding action during the “June gloom” phenomenon, when overcast skies create low-light conditions all day long. I’ve had some of my best days bass fishing during June gloom using damselfly nymph patterns stripped on an intermediate line.
The early summer is a good time to fish big deer-hair top-water patterns or poppers stripped on or just beneath the surface with a floating line in 10 to 15 feet of water. I’ve also had good results at that time of year stripping the Umpqua Swimming Baitfish (shad color) or a Dahlberg Diver, using a slow-sinking intermediate line.
During the heat of summer, the fish stay deep most of the day, but action can be frenetic during the last hour of the light as the bass come into the shallows to feed, particularly if there is some wind.
At midsummer, by the dam, fishing from a boat or a float tube in the late afternoon using a Type 6 full sinking line with a baitfish imitation weighted with a conehead or dumbbell eyes, stripped along the dam’s rocky riprap, often yields outstanding results, as long as you can get the fly down 20 to 30 feet deep.
From the summer through the fall, you’ll often see bass busting the surface, chasing threadfin shad. If you can find the boils and cast a white or gray streamer into the melee, you’re almost guaranteed a hookup. One of my favorite baitfish imitations is Enrico Puglisi’s Shad pattern in gray, size 1/0. This fly has produced consistent results for me over the years in both the spring and summer months. Puglisi recommends fishing it on a short tippet with a Loop Knot such as the Nonslip Mono Loop for the best action, combined with a series of short, erratic strips and an occasional pause and twitch. With Perris’s temperate climate, largemouth bass fishing often stays good through October, sometimes into November, tapering off with the arrival of winter cold fronts.
Once the nighttime temperatures consistently drop into the 40s, the water cools, and action for the lake’s warmwater species chills as well.
Drawdown and Enhancement
Beginning in 2005, Lake Perris faced a serious problem. Seismologists studying the dam found potential defects, calculating that a 7.5 magnitude earthquake would cause a breach, flooding the town of Perris and threatening its near eighty thousand residents. And since the San Andreas Fault runs just a few miles north of the lake, an earthquake of this magnitude is a realistic possibility. In July 2005, the lake was drawn down 25 feet as a safety precaution, and engineering studies to rebuild the dam began.
Dire predictions forecast the demise of the fishery, and fisheries biologists began a two-phase fish enhancement program. The first phase, which took three years to complete, consisted of underwater enhancements for the drawn-down lake. The initial projects were underwater placement of man-made “fish shelters,” which consisted of 400 bundles of Christmas trees and citrus limbs tied together, along with 1,500 tree trunks, stumps, and limbs, weighed down with concrete blocks to keep them on the bottom.
These structures gave the young fry places to hide and escape predation from bigger fish, and the bigger fish seemed to cope just fine. In fact, during the low-water drawdown, local angler Dan Hoover from Hemet caught and released over forty largemouth bass weighing over 10 pounds, including his lake record 18.5-pounder.
Dam reconstruction didn’t begin until 2014, coinciding with phase two of the fish enhancement program. On the exposed, above-water lake bed, numerous brush and tree piles were strategically placed, and 109 “rock reefs” were constructed from 226 dump-truck loads of rock from a nearby quarry, each covering about a thousand square feet. Additionally, two-hundred thousand square feet of gravel was strategically spread out for sunfish spawning grounds and 135 “pipe caves,” consisting of 12-inch-diameter, 4-foot-long pipes, were placed for the channel catfish to spawn in.
Dam construction was completed in 2018, and the water level was raised 30 feet. Trees and vegetation that had grown around the lake’s shoreline were now submerged, creating even more underwater fish structure and habitat.
Bluegills
The Florida-strain bluegills stocked by the DFG in the 1980’s thrive in Lake Perris. In any other bluegill lake, an 11-inch ’gill is considered trophy size, but at Perris, an 11-incher is commonplace, and 12-inch fish are caught routinely. The lake record bluegill weighed in at 3 pounds, 15 ounces. To put that in perspective, the largest bluegill of all time, the IGFA all-tackle world record, caught at Ketona, Alabama, in 1950, weighed 4 pounds, 12 ounces. My largest bluegill from Perris measured just under 13 inches, caught one warm September evening from my float tube on a size 10 black Woolly Bugger with a red bead head, stripped on an intermediate line at the edge of a shallow flat that dropped off into 10 feet deep water.
Like the Perris bass, bluegills move into shallow water when the water temperature climbs into the 60s, then are reliably present in relatively shallow water through the summer and into the early fall. They spawn at roughly the same time as the bass, when the water reaches about 65 degrees, but unlike the bass, they may spawn several times in a season.
Bluegills create extensive “colonies” of spawning beds in 5 to 10 feet of water, preferring sandy, gravely bottoms, easily discerned by distinctive lighter areas that have been scoured of debris. These beds often extend in clusters for a hundred feet or more. When the fish are on their beds, action is nonstop, because any fly dropped into the zone is summarily attacked. It’s possible to have a 100-fish day, if you stick with it. Any small fly will work, but I can vouch that a size 12 olive or black beadhead Woolly Bugger has consistently produced for me. Use a barbless hook for catching and releasing the fish quickly.
Often, while fishing for bass, I’ve hooked what I’ve thought to be a three-pound or four-pound largemouth, only to find an 11-inch ’gill at the end of my line. Ounce for ounce, the bluegill may be the hardest-fighting fish in the lake, and if you scale down to a 3-weight or 4-weight, you can really enjoy the tugs.
If you like fish tacos, I hear the bluegill is the tastiest fish in the lake. If you’re fishing for keeps, I urge you to release the big bluegills (any fish over 11 inches) and keep only the smaller ones. This keeps the big-fish genetics in the gene pool and helps maintain the trophy bluegill fishery.
When the bluegills aren’t spawning, they’re much wilier and tougher to catch, but they have a predilection for damselfly nymphs and small minnows. In the summertime, a weighted black Marabou Leech pattern in size 10 or 12, jigged or trolled right along the bottom, is extremely effective. An olive or black Balanced Leech, Balanced Bugger, or Balanced Baitfish fished under an indicator produces well when fished a foot or two off the bottom in the warmer months, as long as there’s a surface chop to impart enticing motion to the fly.
From midsummer to the fall, the bluegills key in on small fry and minnows, and the deep bite can be fantastic in the late afternoon and early evening, especially if the wind is blowing. I’ve experienced consistent success with a mini Clouser Minnow tied on a size 10 hook with gray and white bucktail and small dumbbell eyes so it sinks quickly. Fishing it on a slow-sinking intermediate line, I can control the fly’s depth and fish it from shallow to 30 feet deep. To go deep, I cast and feed out the entire fly line, count down the fly as it sinks, then slowly kick and troll, keeping the fly deep, twitching it as I go.
When the fish are suspended in the middle of the water column, another tactic that produces great results is to cast and let the fly sink to the bottom, then retrieve it up from the depths with short, quick, staccato strips. The strikes are unbelievably ferocious for such diminutive fish.
Summer evenings are a great time to fish small poppers near the shoreline with a floating line. My favorite is the Dixie Devil, size 10, but any small popper with a cork, foam, or balsawood body, rubber legs, and feather tail will work. Bluegills have tiny mouths, so use a pattern with a size 8 or smaller hook.
Perris is also home to a population of redear sunfish, which tend to hold a little deeper than the bluegills, but can be caught with all the same tactics. When I’m fishing for bluegills, I usually catch one redear for every five bluegills.
Carp
What initially led me to Lake Perris wasn’t the bass or bluegills, but the carp. I’d learned to fly fish for carp, but I wanted to catch even bigger carp, and Perris was known for 30-pound-plus carp routinely caught by bait anglers.
My addiction to carp fishing began well before it became a fad and Montana fly-fishing guides began targeting carp on their days off. When I moved to Orange County in the early 1990s, as luck would have it, just a block from my house was a mile-long section of urban creek chock full of carp. After reading Carp on the Fly, by Barry Reynolds, Brad Befus, and John Berryman, I realized that my local spot was darn near perfect: shallow water, clear enough to sight fish, with opportune wading conditions to stalk “the golden ghost.” But the more I read about fly fishing for carp, the more I realized how difficult it would be. In the foreword to Carp on the Fly, Dave Whitlock writes: “In my opinion, carp are a supreme fly rod challenge, equal to or excelling selective trout, bonefish, or permit in difficulty to take a fly. To be successful hooking carp on flies, one must be very skilled at fly selection, casting, presentation, and fighting fish.” Whitlock, who’s caught carp up to 38 pounds in the Great Lakes, declared the common carp “our smartest and most challenging freshwater gamefish.” Lefty Kreh wrote that “I think that no matter how or where you fish for them, carp are very spooky. Fly fishing for them is a very delicate enterprise requiring lots of skill. You’ve got to make a very good presentation.”
Carp possess what’s known as a “Weberian apparatus,” a detection system that connects sensors in their inner ear to their swim bladder as a resonating chamber, amplifying any sound. This, combined with an extremely sensitive lateral line, allows carp to detect movement, sound, and vibration perhaps better than any other swimming thing. Any little thing will spook a carp: clumsy wading, the shadow of a bird or plane on the water, or the splash of a fly line.
Carp taught me to wade and stalk like a blue heron. And carp taught me to cast quickly and accurately and present the fly as a “head shot,” directly in line with a feeding fish moving toward me, dropping the fly in front of the fish, without spooking it, inside the fish’s small window of perception, all without the fish seeing the fly sink to the bottom or sensing my presence. That is easier said than done, especially for a novice fly fisher. With fish averaging 10 pounds swimming a block from my house, I became obsessed. At first, it was frustrating, but I kept at it. Slowly, but surely, I built a foundation of skills learned by trial and error. I kept a fishing journal, meticulously detailing everything. My wife tied flies for me, and I’d often return home with a chewed-up fly with a bent hook and ask her, “Can you tie some more of these?” I measured every fish, using the standard formula (length times girth squared divided by 800) to calculate each fish’s weight. In three years, I caught and released more than five hundred carp up to 15 pounds. I didn’t get as much work done as I probably should have during those years, but I became a real fly fisher, learning to fly fish by targeting one of the wiliest fish on the planet.
My goal of a truly big carp was attained at Perris in 2009, during the low-water years, when I caught and released a 26-pound carp while wading and sight fishing at the northeast end of the lake. When the lake level was down, excellent sight fishing and wading opportunities existed all along the northeast end lake, with hundreds of acres of knee-deep flats without reeds or bushes for the fish to hide in. It was unbelievably good, with numerous opportunities to cast to aggressively feeding 20-pound carp throughout the day. And with no underwater obstructions, you could let the fish run into the backing without worry. Finding them wasn’t a problem. With polarized sunglasses and the sun at your back, when a 20-pound carp turned broadside, perpendicular to your line of vision, its golden scales lit up like a reflector, and you could spot them a hundred feet away.
Like bass, carp invade the shallows in the spring. If you see them splashing and thrashing among the flooded vegetation, that’s spawning activity, and they’re not interested in eating. The best time to target them is postspawn, in April and May, when they begin aggressively feeding.
Today, with the lake level 30 feet higher, it’s a different lake. What were once shoreline trees is now an underwater forest. But if the lake level is just right (around 1582 surface elevation; you can monitor the lake level at www.lakeperris.lakesonline.com), the northeastern corner of the lake will have acres of wadeable, knee-deep flats. Windy conditions can stir up sediment and reduce Perris’s water clarity, relaxing the wary carp and drawing them into the warm shallows. Look for mudding fish. The carp muds can be quite extensive (a hundred feet long or more), but difficult to sight fish in, due to the murky water. Try to discern the direction the fish are moving in, then work the edges of the mud or target individual fish outside the mud, when you can find them.
Although fly fishing for carp can be extremely difficult, in theory, the process is simple: present your fly to an actively feeding fish without the fish knowing that you’re there, and the fish will eat. Carp are bottom feeders, so let the fly sink to the bottom ahead of them and let them find the fly. When you see one tilt its head down to the fly or see its mouth open, wait a beat, then strip-set, hard. A carp’s lips are as tough as a car tire, so once it’s hooked, you’ll generally lose a fish only if it wraps you up on a snag. After catching dozens of carp at Perris, I’d say the average size is around 17 pounds. Some proven patterns are Whitlock’s Clouser Swimming Nymph, size 8 or 10; beadhead Woolly Buggers, size 10, in rust, olive, or black; damselfly nymphs, size 8 or 10; Barr’s Dragonfly Nymph, size 4 or 6; weighted San Juan Worms, size 10;
Egan’s Headstand, size 8; the Carpillicous, size 8; Bartlett’s Hybrid, size 8; weighted crayfish patterns, size 8; and the Carp Coachman, size 8.
For targeting carp in the shallows, I prefer a 7-weight or 8-weight rod with a floating line and a 9-foot tapered fluorocarbon leader with a 3-foot, 12-pound-minimum tippet. Make sure you’ve got at least a hundred yards of backing on your reel.
Lefty Kreh wrote that if you hook a 20-pound carp, “you’ll sound like a preacher at a revival meeting.” Once you catch your first 20-pound carp on a fly, you’ll likely become a carp-fishing aficionado.
Float Tubing
Fishing a big Southern California reservoir such as Lake Perris with a personal watercraft can be intimidating and perplexing. I like to break the lake down into little sections and get to know those spots well. Fishing from a boat will get you more places more quickly, but plying the water in a float tube is a more intimate way to fish.
To fish the northeast side of the lake, launch your float tube from parking lots 11 and 12. The prevailing wind is often from the west, so I usually launch in the late afternoon, let the wind take me to the northeast corner, then fish the prime evening bite. Rather than return via the water, I take out and walk back to the parking lot. This allows me to fish until 7:30 p.m., when boats and watercraft need to be off the water. I rig backpack straps on my float tube for the 15-minute walk back. There is a convenient paved bike path that circles the lake.
Another great float-tubing spot is Bernasconi Beach, located on the southeast side of the lake, accessed from the Ramona Expressway and Bernasconi Road. At the shoreline, you’ll see where the old road disappears into the water. From here, you can head left and fish toward the dam and Rock Climbers Cove, named after a popular rock-climbing cliff above the lake’s southeastern corner, or head to the right and work the shoreline to the northeast. I like to backpack my float tube and walk the bike trail north until I’m parallel to Alessandro Island, then launch and fish the eastern shoreline at an area known as the “tire reef.” Before the dam problems, big tractor tires were dumped there to create fish habitat, and the structure still attracts fish like a magnet.
In the summer months, Lake Perris is extremely popular with high-speed boaters, water-skiers, and jet skiers, particularly on the weekends, which I tend to avoid. For your own safety, stay inside the five-mile-per-hour buoy lines to avoid collisions.
The Future
The fish-enhancement program that took place during the dam reconstruction created excellent habitat and produced huge numbers of smaller fish that avoided predators (bigger fish) by sheltering in the rock reefs and tree limb bundles. In the last several years, I’ve witnessed more baitfish and fry than ever before and have caught hundreds of tiny largemouths, which bodes well for the future of the sport fishery.
Fishing is all about hope and anticipation. At Lake Perris, when my line is in the water, I have a feeling that at any moment, the next hookup could be the one I’m dreaming of — the big one, that fish of a lifetime. My prediction is that it’s only a matter of time before Perris produces a 20-pound-plus largemouth and 4-pound bluegill. Who knows how big the carp will get, but I’m guessing that a new California state record (currently 52 pounds) is swimming in Perris right now.
Besides catching lunkers, with the right fly, you can easily have a multispecies day at Perris — a Perris grand slam. My most productive fly for all the species at Perris is a simple black Woolly Bugger, tied on a size 10 streamer hook with a black marabou tail and blue/green dubbing palmered with size 12 or 14 black dry-fly hackle. I usually start with a blue or purple glass bead head, then add 15 wraps of .020-inch wire to help it sink. Fishing this fly on an intermediate line, you’ll have a good chance of catching bluegills, redears, largemouths, and carp in a single day. And, if you’re lucky and can stand the excitement, you might just coax a giant catfish to dance on the end of your line.
If You Go…
There is a $10 day-use entry fee per vehicle at the Lake Perris State Recreation Area, $20 for weekends and holidays from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The California Explorer annual pass ($195) is good for day use at all California State Parks for one year. The Golden Poppy annual pass ($125) includes all state park reservoirs and inland parks.
The boat launch fee is $10, but there is no fee for kayaks or float tubes. All boats and personal watercraft must pass a quagga and zebra mussel inspection at the entrance gates. Summer boating hours are from 6:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Winter hours are from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Camping is available by reservation ($35 for tent/trailer sites) by calling (800) 444-7275 or online at www.reservecalifornia. com (enter “Lake Perris SRA”).
— Bob Gaines
