Top 5 Winter Fishing Holes
For hardcore anglers, just about any fishing is better than none at all. It’s not even necessarily a matter of traveling to a warmer climate. It’s the fishing, so they bundle up and cast along the edges of icy slush. Sometimes they catch something, but mostly it’s just a way to scratch the deep itch of winter. Here are the Top 5 winter fishing holes we think you’ll enjoy:
1 OCEAN RUNNERS [WASHINGTON] Steelhead in the Pacific Northwest are perhaps the most intensely politicized fish on earth. They are big, beautiful, and hard to catch. Their runs have been decimated by decades of habitat loss and overfishing. Freshwater trout are a sport, but oceangoing steelhead are a passion. It is a tilting-at-windmills sort of fishing, hard labor in lousy weather, all for the rare thrill of a violent yank at the other end of the line.
There are still fishable winter runs of both wild and hatchery steelhead on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, perhaps the prettiest of all the regions they call home. Hatchery steelhead, identified by a clipped adipose fin, start returning to coastal rivers by mid-November in most years. These runs usually peak in December, with fish averaging 5 to 9 pounds and occasionally reaching 15 pounds or more. By mid-January, wild fish, commonly 10- to 12-pounders with a few at 20 pounds or more, have often started their winter run. Even 30-pounders are possible, though exceedingly rare.
2 SKI-SLOPE TROUT [COLORADO] There are some truly crazy trout fishermen in Colorado, where tire chains and four-wheel-drive vehicles are basic equipment for winter fishing. If those can’t get you to your favorite December water—and yes, that happens—you may need a snowmobile, too. Flyfishing for snowbound trout isn’t about to replace alpine skiing as a growth industry here, but in recent years it’s been getting increasingly serious attention.
Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Steamboat—scratch deeply enough around any major Colorado ski resort and you’ll find at least a few winter flyfishers. They’ve figured out that as long as there’s some open, flowing water nearby, the trout will eat something no matter how cold it is outside. They’ve also learned that the same sort of high-tech clothing that makes skiing pleasurable makes winter trout fishing bearable, too. Just trade your breathable ski bibs for breathable waders and wear fleece underneath. The water you’re standing in will likely be warmer than the air anyway.
3 HOG WALLOW [CALIFORNIA] Let’s cut to the chase: 22 of the 25 largest largemouth bass ever taken (according to Bassmaster magazine) have come from small reservoirs in southern California. The daytime highs for December and January in much of the area average around 70. If you fish this region during the winter, you’ll probably be over some monsters. And you most likely won’t be shivering either, at least not from the cold.
So here’s a sleeper for you, a big one. Diamond Valley Reservoir in Riverside County near Hemet, southeast of Los Angeles, is the newest and largest water-supply project in the area, having been completed in 2003. The lake is big for this region—4½ miles long by 2 miles wide—and has been generously stocked with both Florida-strain largemouths and rainbow trout, the combination that has made Southern California bass fishing so famous. Diamond Valley is open year-round from sunrise to sunset. There’s a boat ramp, but the types of outboard motors allowed are severely restricted. Rental boats are available at a marina on the lake.
4 STEEL MAGNET [NEW YORK] It’s only 10 miles long, within easy reach of the urban Northeast, and it just may be one of the world’s best steelhead rivers. The lower Niagara, which carries the out-flow of Lake Erie from Niagara Falls to its mouth on Lake Ontario in extreme western New York, is big, fast, deep, and at times dangerous water. It’s also a magnet for Lake Ontario’s steelhead, plus brown and lake trout, especially in winter.
Before you grab your waders and head for the car, know that the best fishing here is by boat. Drift fishing provides the mobility needed to find active fish in the big river. And there’s considerable finesse required to catch them. As the area around the falls ices up toward midwinter, the flows downriver tend to stabilize and clear. Winter steelhead in clear water are among the world’s fussiest fish, and getting the right drift with a small spawn sack on a light leader is no easy matter
5 BASS ON THE BORDER [TEXAS] By what’s been written in recent years, you’d think Lake Fork near Dallas was the only bass lake in Texas. It isn’t, of course, but the attention given to its ability to pump out big bass has overshadowed dozens of other worthwhile waters. So here’s some advice for winter bass hunters shivering through yet another Dallas December: Go south.
It’s about a 480-mile drive from Dallas down to the 84,000-acre Falcon Reservoir on the Rio Grande at Zapata, Texas. When it comes to bass fishing, this is about as far south—and as warm in winter—as you can get and still be in the Lower 48. The international boundary with Mexico passes through the middle of the lake.
Fishing at Falcon is on a roll. After years of drought, rains starting in the fall of 2003 brought lake levels back to near normal, flooding newly grown shoreline brush in the process. All that cover has helped recently spawned juvenile largemouths to survive. That, combined with recent stocking programs, is starting to produce some outstanding fishing. Nor are all the bass little ones. It took a stringer of five of them averaging more than 5 pounds each to win a tournament here in March 2005, and a 14-pounder was caught the following month.