Juma and his cousin talked me into taking a run down to Powell to catch stripers in my boat. We traveled down to Bullfrog on Thursday afternoon and slept that night on our cots under the stars in the campground that night. We launched at first light and ended up sightseeing for several hours before settling on a camp spot in Halls Creek Canyon. We unloaded our camping gear to clear the boat for fishing around 9 am. Our first spot near the mouth of Halls Creek only produced 2 stripers in an hour, so we moved onto the mouth of Lake Creek Canyon, that’s where we found them. We filled my cooler over the next several hours. We caught them on 3/8 oz jig heads tipped with cut anchovies or mussels, and also on swim baits. The catching was slow at first, but soon turned into a feeding frenzy. You could watch them come up and smack your jigs on the fall in the clear water. When I got back to camp in the afternoon, I went to work filleting a total of 84 mostly 16-18" stripers that had surprisingly nice fillets on them. That evening after dinner, the guys commenced fishing from the bank and started catching stripers. I caught several and went to the tent to change clothes, decided to lie down for a few minutes, and the next thing I know, it’s dark outside, and the guys are snoring on the cots next to me. I slept through the evening session. In the morning, I found 30 stripers and a 20" 5# Large Mouth Juma caught on a mussel in the box. They said they threw back as many as they kept that evening. After filleting up the catch from the previous night, we ran back to Lake Canyon to pick up where we left off the Day before. Again, it started slow, then it got a lot faster, but the fish were a little deeper. On the first day, they were 25-35’ down, and on day two, 35-50’ down. We put 60 more in the box before midday, when we decided to call it a day, fillet fish, pack up camp, and head home. Fun trip, that place is amazing, it’s huge, makes you feel very small, would love to spend a week exploring and figure out other species instead of what felt like a turn and burn. I ended up filleting 174 stripers, resulting in 45 pounds of fillets.
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Sure, sounds like a fun and productive trip. If you weren’t an expert at fileting fish, you probably are now after fileting that many fish. Was the water level a hindrance at being so low these days.
Well you did well for never being there before, glad you had a safe trip
Nice job Shawn… Sounds like fun… J
looks like an AWESOME trip. I need to make a Powell run, I’d love to get pounds of filets to bring home like this.