We started out our annual fishing trip on Sunday, April 24 and fished through Friday, April 29 and it didn’t disappoint. We parked our houseboat along with our group of boats in Last Chance. We fished Rock Creek, Last Chance, West Canyon, and Face Canyon. Face and West resulted in the most dependable fishing. Last Chance was good too but Rock Creek just wasn’t good for us. Rock Creek seemed to also be more murky than other canyons which seemed to slow fishing.
The week started out in the 70’s weather wise but the previous cool weather dropped the water temps down so fishing was a little slower at the beginning of the week. Once the 80 degree days came it started bumping the water temps up into the 60-64 degree range. The latter part of the week with the warmer temps resulted in better fishing throughout the day. In some canyons we even found water temps from 65-67 degrees but it didn’t seem to affect the fishing much yet.
With the warming water though, we found smallmouth bass staging on beds in West and Face Canyon on shallow rock shelves that gradually slopes into the water. Not full spawn though. It made for fun fishing though since they were in shallow, clear water. We also found a lot of fish deeper in 15-25 feet of water in deep shelves/reefs. A lot of bass would be sunning themselves on the slick rock too in the mornings so look for those shadows and don’t forget to hit those when it looks good.
As for lures used, I’ve listed them below numbered by most successful to least.
- Ned rig (green pumpkin variations with different flakes) - finesse and big TRD
- Brown and cinnamon grubs and 1/8 oz to 3/16 oz jig head
- Creature/craw plastics Texas rigged
- White/chartreuse Spinnerbaits in windy, murky water
- Craw colored/patterned crank baits and chatterbaits in windy/murky water along rocky structure
As for fish caught, we picked up every major species of fish expect bluegill/sunfish. Largemouth and smallmouth bass were caught on everything above. When we picked up the occasional striper, it was on the grubs when running it through deeper water in the back of coves or near the channel. The few walleye and crappie caught were mostly random while slowly dragging a ned rig or grub along the bottom. They tended to be deeper.
Lastly, it was an epic trip at Lake Powell as far as fish caught. Not only was the weather amazing but we caught a 6.30lb largemouth, a 4.24lb largemouth, a 3.66 lb largemouth, a 2.84lb largemouth and then a 3.84 lb smallmouth and a 2.5lb smallmouth. We also caught a 2.62lb walleye and a 1.32lb crappie. We weigh a lot of our fish for our fish derby we do each year with our big group so that’s why we have so many weight measurements and our produced the best out of 5 boats. We won the most out of the prize pool based on the daily fish prizes for the biggest fish of the 5 major species. Others in our group also caught lots of stripers in the 2-3.5lb range fishing grubs in canyons. See pictures below for the signature fish we caught.
Overall, the fish were very healthy and we caught mostly smallmouth with 2-5 LMB throughout the day. Fishing pressure picked up Friday but we could tell with the warming weather and water, the fishing was really starting to turn on.
Lake Powell fishing is like nothing else. Tight lines everyone!
