A Hot Year For King Salmon At Don Pedro   By: Dan Bacher June 30, 2006 More Articles by Dan

       This has been a good year for kokanee and rainbow trout fishing at Lake Don Pedro, but it is the numbers and size of the lake’s king salmon that have produced the most angling excitement on this remarkable Mother Lode fishery.

A 5.4 pound chinook caught by Vance Staplin took big fish honors in the Don Pedro Kokanee Power tournament in May, while Bruce Hamby and other guides have reported catching a lot of fish in the 4 to 5 pound class to date.

“I started fishing for kings this year in mid March and haven’t had a bad trip yet,” said Bruce Hamby of Sierra Sportfishing on a trip I made with him to Don Pedro on June 1. “We caught limits on every trip except one. On that trip, a couple had 17 hook-ups, but ended up with just nine fish in the boat.”

Don Pedro’s king salmon fishery is unique in that it comprised of a mixture of naturally spawned salmon, the progeny of fish that spawn in the Tuolumne River, and supplemental plants by the DFG. The DFG stocked Don Pedro with 100,000 king salmon in 2004 and another 100,000 fish in 2005.

The kokanee in the reservoir are also self-sustaining, with ideal spawning conditions available on the Tuolumne above the reservoir. Since 2002, the DFG has stocked approximately 10,000 kokanee in the reservoir each year. DFG biologists and anglers believe that larger plants would overwhelm the lake's naturally produced population.

Hamby forecasted that the fishing would slow down soon as the kokanee fishing picked up, so he advised me to get to Don Pedro as fast as I could. We launched in his boat from the Blue Oaks Recreation Area launch ramp at around 6 am.

One by one, Hamby put out the rods, all G. Loomis CR84 7 feet ultra-light rods fast action rods with 4600 C3 Abu Garcia Ambassadeur reels. He put the “rolled” threadfin shad down at a variety of depths, ranging from 60 to 105 feet.

We had several hits during our first hour, but we did not hook a fish until 7:30 a.m. When the fish grabbed the shad, I reeled down, popped the line off the downrigger and the most memorable battle of the day began.

I checked the drag, making sure that the fish was able to pull out the line easily when it ran. “The fish will try running up past the boat,” Hamby advised. Just as he said, the fish started surged up toward the bow. “That’s a good fish,” he said.

I battled the fish to the boat and it turned out to be the biggest day’s biggest king, a bright and shiny 4 pounder.

Over the next hour, we landed several more fish, including two smaller kings, a 2-1/2 pound king, a fat kokanee, and a rainbow. We had one limit in the box, along with releasing a couple of fish.

“I rely on solunar tables,” he forecasted, “and they say that the next major bite should take place around 1 pm. You can almost set your watch by these tables as to when the bite will begin.”

We had a couple of hours of slow action and, as he predicted, the bite busted loose just before 1 p.m. We ended up catching two limits, including 6 king salmon, 2 kokanee and 2 pretty holdover rainbows before 2 p.m. We had a ball hooking and landing these fish on the light gear that Hamby uses.

The kings ranged from 1-1/2 to 4 pounds, averaging over 2 pounds each, while the two kokanee ranged from 14 to 14-1/4 inches. Although we caught the majority of fish on the shad, we fooled a king, kokanee and a red-striped holdover rainbow trout with a Fastrix swim bait trolled at 60 to 100 feet.

The kings hit best at 105 to 100 feet deep. We fished a variety of areas, but found the most consistent action at the west side of Jenkins Bay.

Although the Lake Don Pedro Marina has a 12 pound king mounted on the wall, Hamby’s personal best king was an 8 pounder. “The king salmon fishing seems to go in ten year cycles,” he noted. “1980 was a very good year as was 1990 and 2000.”

Hamby has been fishing the lake since he was a kid in the 1950s. Before the new reservoir was completed in 1971, he fished for German browns and rainbows in the original, smaller reservoir that was inundated by the waters of New Don Pedro Reservoir.

When rolling shad, Hamby puts his bait about 20 to 30 feet behind a ball troll. This is to imitate a crippled shad behind a school of shad. He trolls with the wind at 1-1/4 miles per hour and ¾ to 1 mile per hour when the lake is calm.

“When the salmon see the ball flashers, it looks like a school of bait,” said Hamby. “Then they see the rigged shad, which looks like a crippled minnow, and hit it.”

We found most of the action wherever we saw good concentrations of the kokanee. The rainbows were in the top layers from 30 to 60 feet, the kings on the bottom at 105 to 110 feet deep and the kokanee in-between.

The larger kings feed on the small kokanee, as evidenced by the two kokes that we found in the stomach of our largest salmon, although their primary forage is threadfin shad. Although kokanee are plankton feeders, they also forage on shad.

Don Pedro is a hard fishery to beat – and is definitely my favorite Mother Lode lake to fish. Not only does the lake have good populations of king salmon, kokanee salmon and rainbow trout, but largemouth bass, channel catfish, crappie and bluegill thrive in its waters. The lake also has a sleeper German brown population, caught mainly on minnow imitation lures in the Tuolumne River in the spring.

To book a trip with Bruce Hamby, call Sierra Sportfishing at (209) 599-2023. Other guides include Monte Smith of Gold Country Sportfishing, (209) 848-2746, and Danny Layne of Fish’n Dan’s Guide Service, (209) 586-2383. 

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