CENTRAL VALLEY Bar, a little further up in the Sierra foothills, and that’s three solid lakes within a reasonable drive. So in some ways I was going to be Saldana’s guinea pig as we planned a leisurely half-day trip to Oroville. I wasn’t the little youngsters he hopes will convince their parents to book a summer trip, but I felt like a little boy again even before we reached the boat ramp.
ON OUR WAY TO Oroville – about 30 miles north of Yuba City – Saldana pointed out the woefully low Feather River. We’d fished the Feather for both stripers and kings in recent years, but with state officials deciding to not let any water out of Oroville Dam, the river has been all but unfishable for stripers this spring. The sun hadn’t come up on what promised to be a warm but mostly pleasant Central Valley day before summer’s expected barrage of tri-
If parents take their kids out to Oroville to fish, they might be greeted in the parking lot by a few deer. (CHRIS COCOLES)
ple-digit temperatures settle in. Saldana told me to keep on the lookout for deer as we left the city of Oroville and got closer to Bidwell Marina.
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Sure enough, as we slowly reached the parking lot leading to the ramp, we got a glimpse of about 10 does and yearling blacktails, oblivious to the cars both parked and moving past the herd. I told Saldana how excited the youngsters who might be fishing with him soon would be to check out the local wildlife. We passed the local fauna and got the boat into the water. Oroville has been stocked with salmon dating back to long before I fished the lake with now retired guide Rick Kennedy back in 2012. We’d caught a stringer full of landlocked coho that day, and Penny Booth-Crawshaw, manager of the nearby Feather River Hatchery, said coho were stocked at Oroville from 2002 to 2012. Coho, unlike kings, aren’t usually spotted in the Sacramento and Feather River systems, so it makes sense that the Feather River Hatchery only stocks native Chinook in Lake Oroville these days (Booth-Crawshaw says the hatchery gets an allotment of 125,000 Chinook annually). So there are a lot of salmon in the massive lake, but Saldana told me that the fish are congregated in a mostly smallish area – not far