The Striped Bass of Lake Mead, NV.

I moved to Las Vegas in 2004 after guiding salmon on Kodiak Island, AK for the summer. I didn't know about the move before I was to...

I moved to Las Vegas in 2004 after guiding salmon on Kodiak Island, AK for the summer. I didn't know about the move before I was told that I was doing it. I always say that living in Las Vegas for 2 years was the reason I have never lived anywhere near a big city since then.

Las Vegas is fabulous, but not known as a fishing destination

We didn't have a phone or internet access at the lodge I worked at, so we used the good old USPS mail system. It took about 10 days for a letter to make it to the lodge, so by the time I found out that my girlfriend had applied for, interviewed at and accepted a teaching job in Las Vegas, the U-haul was rented, the plane tickets had been bought and a lease had been signed. I wasn't too stoked about the move, but if a 23 year old with no obligations can't have a good time in Vegas, no one can.

I quickly found a job at the local fly shop. There actually was one in Las Vegas back then (it closed in 2006), and it was within walking distance of my apartment. The local fishing was the tricky part to figure out. My co-workers and I dedicated quite a bit of time trying to figure out the striper game in Lake Mead and below Hoover Dam where the Colorado flows into Lake Mojave. The nearest decent trout fishing was a minimum 4 hour drive, and so Lake Mead was the closest fishing beyond bluegill ponds at the city parks, which was a whole different experience in itself.

Stripers were introduced to Lake Mead in 1969 to help attract more anglers to the lake as a once-booming largemouth bass fishery was in decline. By the mid-1970s, the fishery had exploded and populations of stripers had spread down into the river below the dam and into Lake Mojave. (http://www.ndow.org/Bodies_Of_Water/Lake_Mead/) They feasted on another introduced fish, the rainbow trout. I heard a fish and game biologist once describe the stripers like this:

We put them in there, but never thought that they would survive. If they survive, there is no way they will figure out where to spawn. If they spawn, there is no way that the eggs will mature and produce more stripers. If the juvenile stripers do survive, there is no way they will flourish. If they do flourish, there is no way for them to get downstream of the lake. Well, in Jurassic Park fashion, life found a way. There are now millions of stripers spread through that part of the Colorado River system.

A very typical lake Mead striper

There was a back-and-forth propagation of the fishery as rainbow trout were stocked weekly at several sites around Lake Mead, which was the primary source of food for many of the stripers in the lake. The stocking has since ceased as the lake level has dropped below levels where the hatchery can efficiently use the water among other problems.

The stripers are still there though and have managed to figure out how to survive and flourish without the weekly feedings. To say that they are overpopulated is an understatement. There are millions of them, and they run in schools that seem to never end. It reminded me of a mountain lake with way too many brook trout. It didn't take terribly long to figure out how to catch them.

Gear
We were lucky to have access to a boat. It wasn't a bass boat, but a "party barge" pontoon boat. It was cheap, and two of us could easily move around on it and my buddy used it on the weekends for all of the party barge activities that one would buy such a craft for. It was really an awesome boat for what we did, but it didn't go very fast or very far. That was ok, because we usually didn't have to go very far to find stripers.

We used stout, 8wt fly rods. My top choices would be a TFO BVK, TFO Clouser, Redington Vice or Redington Predator for a rod that doesn't cost a ton, but will be more than sufficient. We have an article on good fly rods for bass, located here. The lines and flies are heavy, and there is often a stiff breeze. If you are doing it right, the breeze is probably blowing right into your face as you cast into it.

Lines included anything with a big, heavy sink tip. I used an intermediate sinking RIO Outbound Short with a big chunk of T-14 on the end. My top choice today would be a Scientific Anglers Sonar Titan S3/S5/S7, RIO 24' Sink Tip line, or a Teeny T-Series or TS-Series. Anything with a heavy tip will suffice, and consider throwing a chunk of T-14 on the end of it, whatever you can get away with casting (it may not be much, that stuff is hard to cast).

We could see schools of stripers everywhere on the fish finder, from 150 feet deep to near the surface. There were always a lot of them much deeper than we could get to with flies, but we had about 3 spots where they seemed to always be between 20'-30' deep near points that stuck out from shore. If there was a point in the lake that was 30' deep with much deeper water on two sides, then it was gold. Basically, we looked for the edges of bays, but off shore a little ways. We never worried about anything we saw more than 30' deep, it was too hard to get down to them.

When we found a school of stripers at 20'-30', we would get upwind of them, and throw a big cast into the wind. Then the wind would slowly push the boat away from where the fly landed, and we would pull running line off and feed it through the rod guides until we hit the backing. That usually took about 30 seconds, which is about how long it takes to get a fly down 20' in that situation. Often, we would have to count to make sure we were at the right depth. Those "inches per second" ratings on sinking lines need to be accurate!!!

Then once the whole line was tight and we were floating through the school, it was strip, strip, strip usually as fast as possible. Tucking the rod under an armpit was normal as it sometimes took two hands to strip a fly fast enough to get consistent hookups. Occasionally a slower, "trouty" retrieve would work, but more often it was the faster presentations that worked well.

When we were on top of a school, one of us would hook up on nearly every cast.

We did go quite a few times without a boat, finding cliffy areas that we could access, and that dropped off quickly into deeper water. We soon realized that our time fishing from shore was better spent targeting carp or even tilapia, which fight incredibly hard for being a small fish, and will instinctively hit a variety of small baitfish patterns. While we would catch stripers from shore occasionally, they really required a boat to be productive.

Flies

We didn't really vary the flies all that much. We used a lot of Clouser Minnows, mostly in white/grey, white/red and white/chartreuse. They worked well, and I never found a need to change to anything else. They got down quick and keep a good profile at slow and fast speeds. I am sure that any decent baitfish pattern will produce. Here are our top striper patterns.

Big poppers worked really well in the late evening on the lake. Like really late. We would often go out after dinner, putting on the lake at about 8:00 and fishing until 11 or so. The schools of stripers really moved up near the surface at that time. They were rarely deeper than 20' when we would spot them on the fish finder. Poppers by moonlight. August and September were the best months for poppers, plus no one wants to be outside mid-day in August anywhere near there.

The Fish
If (in 2005) there was a striper in Lake Mead that weighs more than 5 pounds, I would be surprised. What they lacked in size, they made up for in numbers and aggressiveness. We would often catch 20-30 each in a day of pretty easy fishing. The casting sucked, and the 30 seconds of setup for the retrieve, but the results made it easy to deal with.

A couple of the guides I met along the way said a 10 pound Lake Mead striper was a trophy (in 2005). Below Lake Mead is another story. The area we fished is called Willow Beach, and the numbers of fish were really low, but the average size was much bigger, and they were harder to catch.

Looking downstream from Hoover Dam

Willow Beach is still stocked every Friday morning with rainbow trout (last I checked with my friends that still live there). When they back the truck up to dump those fish in, the stripers can hear the "beep beep beep" of a commercial truck in reverse. They start to boil and rush towards the beach where the trout are dumped in. I have seen fish appear from out of nowhere and swim right past my little boat without a second thought about me as it went towards that dinner bell of a truck beeping.

There was often what looked like a straight-up feeding frenzy, but it would only last a minute or two. We never hooked anything during that initial frenzy as there was an area roped off where we could not go, and the fish were well within that area.

Nonetheless, we fished those big rainbow trout patterns. Stripping a 10" streamer can wear one's arm out really quickly, and was only mildly successful. I think I hooked one with that method and had a handful of mildly curious follows, yet we gave Willow Beach many Friday mornings thinking that this was the best method.

We found after several trips, that it is more productive to go on a different day of the week and work a clouser as deep as you can get a fly down in the current. Rowing a small, one-man pontoon boat upstream for an hour and fishing back to the ramp turned into our normal routine. We never hooked any of the 40+ pound stripers we saw down there, but 8-10# fish were average, and they were much fatter, fought harder and looked healthier there than in Lake Mead. We gave up the big numbers to catch 2-3 (or zero on many occasions) in a much more tiresome day of fishing with a much longer drive. I could never convince Jeremy, who owned the party barge, to take it down to Willow Beach, so we were stuck with the one-man pontoons. The river moved slow enough to be able to row upstream in a small craft as long as we stayed out of the main currents. It is definitely a more scenic area to spend a day than on the lake.

Lake Mead, really low at Hoover Dam

Lake Mead is getting lower and lower every year as water demands downstream are greater than the flow into the lake plus the evaporation. The future of the lake is uncertain, but the stripers in the lake are not going anywhere anytime soon. Boat ramps and marinas have been rebuilt multiple times as the lake continues to drop, but the fish are still there and still eager to eat a fly, or anything else you can get to them.

Las Vegas is not a fishing destination, but it is a great place to get out and go fishing for a day, especially after absorbing the lights and spectacle of the city. In 2005, there were, and as far as I can tell, still are exactly zero fly fishing guides offering trips in either location, so this is a purely do-it-yourself fishing experience, unless you take the route that I did and hired a gear guide to make fun of me for a few hours as I waived around that "whippy little pole". He kept taking me to schools that were 150 feet deep and asking me what my plan was... Consider bringing your boat next time you find yourself in Vegas, or find a rental boat and escape the manufactured glitz for a few hours in between blackjack games and that Cirque du Soleil show.