Fishing California's Truckee River

The Truckee River, California

The Truckee River is a weird, beautiful, awesome stream with some really big trout in it.

The Truckee is the outlet of Lake Tahoe which pours out at Tahoe City and then is fed by a series of reservoirs.  It flows into Nevada and then dead ends at Pyramid Lake.

Earlier this year when I was home in Montana, I read some posts on Chi Wulff about the Truckee and how the epic California drought is affecting the fishery.  I thought to myself how glad I was that MT has had a great water year and assumed that I'd probably never even see the Truckee.  You know what they say about assuming.  Of course, I got sent down here for two months for work and for the past month I've been living, literally, on the banks of the Upper Truckee.

I've been so busy getting my ass kicked by the Sierras for work but earlier this week, I spend two days exploring the Truckee.

Old pulley wheel in the Truckee R.

The drought is really bad here.  This year, even in mid-September, you want to monitor the water temps and fish in areas below where they're letting water out of the reservoirs.  You can get this information online.  Still, the river is extremely low.

With the extreme drought conditions it is always best to:

1. Fish in the morning
2. Use barbless hooks (everywhere and always!)
3. Don't use these fish for photo-ops (So you can catch a fish, good for you.  You don't need a picture.)
4. Always use a net and keep the fish in the water.  You shouldn't even need to touch it.

The Truckee doesn't have the highest fish numbers but when you do find them, they're freaking huge. You cover a lot of water for not so many fish but, when you do move one, it's enough to keep you excited about fishing.

As of last week, the really high population of crayfish were molting and a JJ Special worked just fine for this "hatch."

No trespassing on the Truckee

Being a spoiled Montanan, I'm not used to this bullshit.  God bless Montana's Stream Access Law!!

Message in a bottle

I found this message in a bottle floating in the Truckee.  I was excited to see what the message said, hoping it might even contain a hundy or two.  Nope, it was some creepy bastard's expression of his love for some chick in Las Vegas.  Disappointed!!

Sky crane helicopter fighting the massive King Fire

Smoke from the King Fire kept the water temps down and made for some great pics.

Smokey fall foliage on the Truckee River, California