Lake Powell Fishing

This past week I (Paul) was on Lake Powell doing some bass fishing for the very first time. The days were generally bright and sunny and the Lake was for the most part quite calm, and the fishing was pretty good also.

We fished for five kinds of fish; smallmouth and largemouth bass, striped bass, walleye, and crappie; the latter two yielding the best eating. I didn't know it until I started the trip that part of the cost of the trip was put into a jackpot for the biggest of each of the five species. Everyone expected a big run of striped bass and though we fished in a hugh stone ampitheater hundreds of feet deep, and saw stripers all over on the fish scope, they wern't biting, so a fairly small catch won the striper jackpot.

Early in the trip we tried trolling in the evening and I brought up a 2.11# walleye which stood as the record all through the trip and worth that part of the jackpot. Next day, we went out for bass and I brought in a 1.4# crappie (the smaller flatter fish in the picture) which also held, though two others matched the weight and we split the jackpot on that one too.

The trip brought back memories of the Scout trip which my dad arranged, down the Colorado River, 53 years ago when we floated the river in large rubber rafts the year before they closed the canyon to build the Glen Canyon dam. Now the bottom 500 feet or so of the river canyon is covered by the lake. We had opportunity to fish several of the small winding arms of the lake Pictures do it injustice as the sandstone walls rise 500 to 1,000 feet above the lake.