Lake McClure

 I took a trip to lake McClure, it was my first time on this body of water. It is located in in Mariposa county in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The this is one of the places the Merced river is damned up.

        I was invited to stay over night and fish Saturday morning by my friends Adam and Holly Baumbach. They are great friends of mine, I was fortunate enough to join a local kayak shop called head waters kayak, that they have been apart of for a few years. We slept in our cars at the campsite the night before and woke up at 5a.m to go fish. Adam told me about an online group that was giving away a hat for the first person to catch a fish and go live while on the salt or fresh water. There was a boat tourney going on so the ramp was crowded we didn’t get on the water till about 6:20, Holly found out that no one had gone live yet so I grabbed a rod and called my fish…Ned rig on that point BAM! Fish on, I asked Holley to go live and with that I had a free hat.

         From google maps this one cove looked super fishy from google earth and navionics. As we worked our way back working the bank and drop offs we were nailing fish. We worked our way back and found fish on beds and were able to double up catches. See some monsters that would not take the baits we were presenting. We threw Ned rigs with crawdad trailers and they could not put the bait down. I threw drop shots as well but did not catch as many on. We worked our way out of the cove to meet up with a friend that had came up with his wife to fish as well. As we come out of the cove the wind was howling so we met up with them and worked our way back into another cove.

          As we were working the point of the new cove we all start to hook up at different times. The fishing was off the hook for the next hr then just died out as the wind pick up and turned the water to mud. We wanted to fish more so we worked a few more areas that were exposed and could not find anything more then a few dinks.

          Other then the wind the back drop was amazing as there were blooms of wild flowers everywhere. On top of that the fishing was incredible, mixed with great friends I could not think of a better way to spend six hours on the water.