Crappy Fishing

When I moved to Arizona from Oregon, I was really looking forward to fishing the 4 Salt River Lakes just north east of where I live (Saguaro, Canyon, Apache, and Roosevelt).

We made a trip to Saguaro the first week we moved here and it was horrible... Dead shad, crappie, and bass covering every inch of the shore. It stunk 1/2 mile before you got to the water. We also found huge amounts of dead fish at a local urban lake where I used to live in Tempe. Golden Algae is apparently to blame. All the lakes have had fish kills except Roosevelt, because it is the first lake in the chain and the algae can't flow upstream. Apache Lake used to be one of the best smallmouth lakes in the west. Now the AZGFD is having a hard time finding any at all!!

Check out this guy's experiences and theory (raw sewage being dumped in the lakes)...

http://www.bajogrande.com/canyonlaketruths.htm
http://www.bajogrande.com/CanyonLakeRaw2.html
http://www.bajogrande.com/canyonlaketruthsIII.html
http://www.bajogrande.com/canyonlaketruthsIV.html

There are two lakes (Pleasant and Bartlett) that are north / northwest that are still good and we will have to focus on them for the time being. It's still too hot to be fishing any of these lakes anyway. We will probably be heading up further north for some trout before too long.

Up on the Mogollon Rim for instance --- which is discussed in this forum on the AZOD website. I found a post full of Rush fans! talking about the Rim. Rush is my favorite band and it's cool to see some fellow Rush nerds also share my love of fishing and camping:

http://www.azodchat.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6328

AZbass or OregonBass??

Since I'm not doing any fishing for a few more weeks, I thought I would put some more of my Oregon pictures up here. I have some pictures of the bigger fish we caught, but I can't find the Kodak CDs and I don't have a scanner for the prints... so these are what I've got on the computer...
This is Jantzen Island on Lake Oswego. There is one huge house on the entire island. It used to be owned by the guy that started Jantzen Sportswear. There ar some huge underwater pipes on the lake side that always had some bass and perch. Caught some nice bass under the bridge too. One day I caught 20 bass circling the island in about an hour --- and lost the biggest one! It would have been #13...


Here is my old boat on the Willamette River in Portland. Those are houses that float on the water in the background. Lots of smallmouth in this river! The 5 years I owned that boat, I had that camper top and never used it! This picture is from the consignment place that sold it for me.


This is a bay off Lake Oswego on a rare sunny day.



I found this picture of Point of Pines Lake, AZ on the web. I hope to go camping out there this year. It is on the San Carlos Indian Reservation and supposed to be very remote and have some good trout fishing.

Oregon to Arizona

I spent 5 years in Oregon living my dream. I lived right on Lake Oswego and had a fishing boat outside my back door. The lake was full of bass, perch, crappie, blue gill, red-eared sunfish, trout, salmon, and even sturgeon.


Here is the view off my patio in Lake Oswego.

I sold the boat and moved back to the desert. I have been fishing three times down here. I caught two decent bass in some local urban ponds. Going forward, I will take my camera and post every outing's highlights.

There is some good fishing down here and I'm going to explore it as much as possible. Right now, it's too hot and I don't have a boat for any decent night fishing, but I will get out there soon. Hopefully we will be doing some high country camping and we will get into some trout. Once it cools off, I will go after some bass and the huge flathead catfish we have down here.

It will be hard not to miss the fat largemouths and spunky smallmouths I had right outside my door in Oregon... However, bass fishing is good for a very short time up there and it is cold 10 months of the year. Am I rationalizing? We will have to see what kind of luck I can make for myself in Arizona!!