Shasta Lake is holding at about 128' below full pool and although it hasn't come up much in the past few months, it hasn't dropped much during our current dry spell either.  I've never fished Shasta Lake in the spring under current levels but in doing so, I'm learning a lot!  While conditions seem to be very favorable, I am noticing some distinct differences in the lake relating to how it usually fishes in the month of March.  There's been several day where I have been left scratching my head wondering what I need to do next in order to get the bites I need to keep my clients interested during the day.  Water color is perfect!  Water temps are cooler than normal and are consistently in the 47-48 degree ranges to start the day no matter where in the lake I'm fishing most days.  There are huge schools of Shad in many parts of the lake and we're seeing Shad anywhere from 2" to 4" in size right now.  The King salmon are spread out all over the lake but we're catching most of them in the upper arms.  All are in the 3 pound class, nothing smaller or larger so far this spring.  The Kokanee are starting to show, but in very limited numbers although we havent been looking for them either.  Rainbows are in their traditional locations and most of our fish are caught in the 15'-20' range each day.  The browns are our most elusive species right now but only the larger specimens.  We have caught more small browns this spring already than I have caught in all the years I've fished Shasta Lake combined.  We are seeing several small browns in the 10"-12" range every day we fish and thats never been the case for me.  We caught 3 keeper size browns and 6-7 baby browns yesterday. I'm patiently waiting for our bigger multi pound browns to show up and start taking our presentations, but they have lots of big Shad to eat right now and seem to be content feeding on them at the moment.  I suspect we'll be getting into them again any day now but time will tell.  Everything could change with a big influx of water into Shasta, but that doesn't seem likely at this point.  I'm getting excited for the spring warm up and think our May through July trout and salmon fishing will be excellent!  We will have plenty of water to get us through the early part of our summer season, but we're not banking on the latter part of summer and early winter this year.  With a stronger return of Sac River King salmon forecasted this year, we'll all be off the lake by mid August and will be concentrating on river Kings through the end of 2022.  

Captain Jeff Goodwin