We asked for this, didn’t we? With the apocalyptic levels of rains pummeling down from the heavens and subsequent flooding, we quickly went from celebrations of long-awaited water from the sky to stockpiling sandbags and praying for a quick end to it all. In addition to everything else that the rains produced, the floods and muddy waters coming from the hills have changed a lot of fisheries. Just take a look at California’s reservoirs, many of which quickly filled up to full capacity from below 50 percent or even below 20 percent of full pool before the storms. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that in the long term, more water is a great thing for the fish in California’s reservoirs, but what is the immediate effect of this sudden, huge increase in water levels and volume?
Fishing in areas completely reshaped by flooding can be intimidating, especially when the norm for the last 5 to 10 years has been constant drought and low water levels. Spots that used to fish well are in some cases under a hundred feet of water, and reservoirs that anglers might have fished with confidence for years look unrecognizable after this winter. I can’t help but be excited by all this change, though, and not just for the long term, either.
Ever since the rains started, most of my local fisheries have fished like completely different lakes, and every day is proving to be an exciting puzzle to solve. Lakes that haven’t reached full capacity yet are still rising every day, and even if they rise slowly, the lake level changing by just an inch can completely change the way it fishes. When you can fish the same areas day after day and always be fishing slightly different water, it’s something that needs to be appreciated. And the lakes that are full are also are full of new structure: areas that haven’t been flooded for over twenty years are loaded with trees, brush, and grasses, insects and other food for the fish, not to mention all the new spawning areas.
Carp in Floodwaters
Let’s start off with my favorite fish to chase in these conditions: the ever-adaptable carp. Years like this one
are some of the best for targeting them, and if you’ve been on the fence about chasing carp on the fly, this is the year to give it a shot. I started seeing carp feeding in ultrashallow water during the first big storms of January, when my favorite lake’s water temperature was around 48 degrees, and they haven’t left the shallows since. Carp are omnivores, and the newly flooded areas must have looked like a buffet to them.
During this spring, I’ve also witnessed the earliest start to the spawning season for carp that I’ve ever seen — not only the earliest start, but the longest-running spawn I’ve witnessed at this intensity. Hundreds, if not thousands of carp have been loading into the shallows of my favorite lake since mid-February, moving through the flooded brush in massive parties reminiscent of those rumored Hollywood orgies from the sixties and seventies. With the number of fish in the shallows, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them are spawning multiple times, using their newfound freedom with all this extra water to do their thing.
Spawning carp don’t quietly make a bed or a redd, like bass or trout — they move around in big groups, usually one or two females at the front with about twenty smaller males rushing in behind them and knocking into the females to jar their eggs loose and fertilize them. Since carp spawn this way, they avoid trapping ethically questionable fishermen in a situation where they are easy to catch while spawning. Spawning carp won’t look at anything you throw at them — they’re too busy having fun spreading their genes. It’s best to just leave them to it and enjoy watching the ongoing proceedings.
Catching nonspawning carp during these events, however, is a hoot. Is can be difficult for people just starting to chase these majestic golden beauties, because it’s easy to get caught up in following groups of the loudest and most obvious carp. Instead, what you need to do is find the fish that actually are feeding, and these are swimming around the edges of the orgy, benefiting from the collateral damage it causes. Spawning carp make a lot of commotion when engaging in their R-rated behavior and root up a ton of mud and all the things living in that mud. Worms, leeches, damselfly nymphs, and scuds are all thrown around while big groups of love-eyed carp spawn. The other carp, the carp that are hungry, either because they’re fattening up before the spawn or are munching down on food to recharge after spawning, are feeding on all the extra food being stirred up, often blindly just going at it. Some of the least spooky and most aggressive carp you’ll ever encounter are feeding heavily during these moments.
To find these hungry, golden-scaled, mustachioed wonderfish, break away from the commotion of the spawners and look for fish rooting around in the mud clouds following them. Often, while watching groups of carp moving around spawning, you’ll notice a pattern of twenty to fifty fish following the spawn group, but after that, just a handful of solo fish or smaller groups of fish rooting around and moving much more slowly than the spawners. Those are the fish you want. Once you’re dialed in on the behavioral pattern, you can explore and bring to hand an awesome number of carp throughout the day. It’s possible for one angler to have 40-to-60-fish days during this spawning activity.
And then one day you show up, and there aren’t any massive groups of love-blind fish moving around, and it’s all changed again. I should mention that the spawn isn’t a blanket time period from start to finish. Some days they are spawning like wild, and then there are a lot of days between where you won’t run into a single spawner. Each lake will be slightly different, too, and in some lakes, the spawn is over and done within a week, while others will have longer windows for this kind of fishing. That is just one of the awesome things about chasing carp on the fly: every day can be completely different in such a wild way, and the changing water levels this season seem to be exacerbating that.
Generally, you’ll also have another window of amazing fishing following the spawn, when the fish that weren’t feeding while spawning are bulking back up. This is another great time to catch massive numbers of carp. The flats where they were spawning get loaded up with tailing fish rooting around for food on the bottom, and the deeper river channels are loaded with surface-feeding fish in the mornings and evenings.
Another thing: in lakes that are still rising slowly, every time you’re out, you should be paying attention to low-lying areas that may get flooded in the coming weeks. Lately, I’ve been seeing areas where wildflowers had been starting to bloom turn into shallow flats, and I’m expecting to see more of that in the coming weeks. Those areas aren’t just covered with pretty colors of flowers and grass, they’re also full of insects such as beetles, caterpillars, worms, and more. Both prespawn and postspawn carp have been happily feeding in these buffets, and catching them in ankle-deep water covering purple and pink flowers is simply great fun.
As a plus, since the food items that reside in all the newly flooded grounds are mobile, most of these fish are willing to chase down a prey item more aggressively than the clam eaters I’m used to in low-water years. You can often trigger a take by casting past these fish and slowly retrieving the fly to match the speed of a damselfly nymph or by slowly jigging a worm in front of a feeding carp. In fact, most of the spring fish I’ve caught have been taken while slightly moving the fly — a stark contrast from the drought years. Those years, they were keyed in on clams, and moving the fly even slightly seemed to spook every carp that witnessed the unnatural movement.
That’s another reason why this year would be the year to get out and learn how to chase these awesome fish. They’re slightly less spooky than the last few years. The high water makes them happy, which makes them an easier target than you might expect. However, an easy carp is still difficult to catch, compared with most other freshwater fish species, so always approach them slowly, make sure to watch your shadow, and pick your casts well. Good carp anglers make fewer casts and pick out the right fish and the right presentation, rather than casting at every fish they see.
Bass and Panfish
The effects of the high waters in reservoirs and lakes on bass and panfish, such as crappies and bluegills, aren’t so dramatic as they are with carp and won’t really pay off until in the coming years, but in the short term, the inundations have created a lot more water for anglers chasing largemouth, smallmouth, and spotted bass to fish, but it has also spread the fish out. Most of the lakes I fish for bass are now at around 100 percent capacity, and the shoreline is covered in green bushes and trees. This has created almost too much good-looking structure, and unless you have front-facing sonar on your bass boat or tube and love taking all the mystery out of fishing, you will just have to cover a lot of water in order to be successful.
Where lakes are still muddy from the rains and snowmelt, big flies in dark colors are key. One of the best ways to target bass in this situation is to rig with a big black-and-blue crayfish fly with a rattle and weed guard and toss it deep into the flooded bushes. When the water rises, bass push right into the shoreline and keep tight to the structure. Getting your fly deep into this new structure is a must, and a weedless crayfish pattern allows you to cast into the vegetation and put the fly down near the bottom, right into the face of the fish. Since most of these areas are relatively shallow, a heavy crayfish pattern fished on a floating line is best, and a good way to tell when a fish hits the fly is by watching the end of the line for any twitches while the fly is falling or stopped.
Fishing top-water patterns is another fun way to target fish in structure. Fishing a big mouse or rat fly, a frog imitation, or just a big baitfish popper in the muddy water is not just a productive way to chase bass, but exciting, as well, and it’s not limited to the low-light hours of the morning and evening. Top-water patterns can make a commotion when retrieved and offer a bigger silhouette than subsurface flies, so this is an ideal technique for rising and muddy water. One of my favorite ways to do this is with a popper or a slider on an intermediate line, cast tight to flooded vegetation. When you strip it, the intermediate line will drag the fly under the surface, and then it pops back up again. The longer the strip, the deeper the dive, and you also can adjust the action of the fly with a longer or shorter leader. A longer leader allows you to get the fly to dive just under the surface, while a shorter leader allows you to fish the fly under the surface through most of the retrieve, instead of right on or near the top. Both techniques can be deadly, so I recommend playing around with them during this high-water spring. The rising water has drawn fish into the shallows, and given the chance, very few bass in shallow water will say no to a top-water fly.
The bass prowling the edges of the flooded trees and bush should not be overlooked, either. Especially prior to spawning, they won’t say no to a big baitfish imitation slowly worked on the outside edges of this kind of structure. Bass use flooded cover to trap schools of baitfish, and you can trigger big bites this time of year by fishing a suspended or slow-sinking baitfish imitation such as a Bulkhead streamer or Game Changer slowly, parallel to the flooded bush line. Currently, one of my favorite ways to fish in these situations is to use a big 12-to-15-inch Alabama Rig fly, such as my Mega Sweet Home Alabama (see the May/June 2022 issue of California Fly Fisher), built on a light tube such as you’d use for salmon or steelhead patterns, which allows me to change flies back to a weedless baitfish imitation when fishing around cover. I throw the fly tight to the structure and work it slowly and steadily on an intermediate line through the flooded brush. Every now and then, I give it a “pop” with the rod tip, which activates the umbrella portion of the fly and makes it pulse like a school of scared baitfish. Usually this is when it gets hit by a bass, and when fishing the bigger sizes of flies, the fish are generally also big.
Other fish that love these flooded waters are crappies and bluegills. I’ve had a ton of fun this year having my clients catch a lot of crappies and bluegills by fishing popper-dropper setups in the back of coves filled with flooded brush. The crappies, in particular, seem fired up by the availability of all this flooded vegetation, being lovers of woody structure. The most fun way to fish for them is to throw a smallish popper, small baitfish imitation, or frog popper with a dropper of 24 to 30 inches that ends with a small leech, worm, or damselfly pattern. This allows you to suspend the dropper over the top of the woody structure that attract crappies. Slowly working the popper mostly brings bites to the dropper, but every now and then, one of the more aggressive crappies will slam the popper, a lot of fun. I suspect the noise the popper makes brings attention to the dropper fly, although I can’t scientifically prove that. Fishing like this doesn’t bring in just crappies, but everything else feeding aggressively in the shallows, such as bluegills and the occasional largemouth. If you want to target largemouths with a similar setup, just upsize the popper and the dropper, although I’ve caught and seen a lot of big bass caught on small damselfly and leech patterns. Especially on reservoirs or in fisheries where the fish get pressured by a lot of conventional-tackle anglers, sometimes downsizing works wonders.
Making the Most of the Times
This winter’s deluge of rain might have made people think we were in a Noah’s Ark situation — me included. But with warming weather and newly flooded flats and vegetation, warmwater fishing this spring has gotten off to a fantastic start, and adjusting your tactics to f it the new situation can pay off in awesome ways. Whether you want to whet your appetite by chasing the ghost of the flats, carp, load up on numbers of crappies, or fling big flies to big bass hiding in flooded brush, high lake levels are leading to fantastic angling opportunities. In the long term, the water we received this year will pay off with awesome fishing, thanks to exponentially increasing spawning and feeding habitats, but in the short term, fishing this spring will be a new and exciting challenge. You won’t miss your old spots from low-water years while you learn all the new structures and areas where the fish now hold and feed.
