Lake Berryessa Produces Thick Kokanee Fillets for NorCal Anglers
by Jack Naves

NAPA COUNTY, CA – Nestled almost directly in between Sacramento and Santa Rosa, Lake Berryessa offers challenging yet rewarding cold and warm-water fisheries.  It’s always been a favorite of mine because of the massive kokanee salmon it produces.

Kokanee, which are landlocked cousins of sockeye salmon, provide tasty orange fillets to anglers willing to troll slowly enough to entice strikes.  It’s a niche fishery and has become very popular across the Western United States over the past twenty years.

Because of mussel restrictions and other factors, I hadn’t had my own boat onto Berryessa’s inviting emerald waters since 2022.  That all changed this past August 1st, when my son Adam joined me on an early-morning adventure.

The week before the trip, I ran my boat down Interstate-80 to Gone Fishin’ Marine in Dixon to have my boat decontaminated for launching at Lake Berryessa.  Mussel-prevention regulations require a quarantine or decontamination, so I chose the latter and paid the fee.  On the morning of the trip, Adam and I left the house at 4:30 am sharp and were in line to enter Markley Cove Resort a little over an hour later.

Adam wanted to do some bass fishing, so we stopped at a rocky point just short of the main lake after launching.  “RRRR-RR-RRR!” the main motor roared in protest as I eased back the throttle.  My throttle cable was old, and the motor voiced its displeasure as we came to a halt.  I shifted the controller to the neutral position, but the motor remained in gear.

After swiping the controller arm back and forth between forward and reverse a few times, we were back in business and made some casts with our bass lures.  Without any takers, we gave up on bass and shot out to the main lake to deploy our downriggers for kokanee.  Rich Crispi of TW Fishing Guide Service had tipped me off on a location on the main lake where he had recent success with clients.

The morning bite was hot, and we landed five kokanee by 8:30 am.  We had eight in the cooler by 9:30 am, but then the classic ‘Berryessa Beatdown’ kicked in.  For those of you who are new to Lake Berryessa, let me explain some tendencies related to fishing the lake for kokanee salmon.

First, you will see lots of great reports on social media, probably guides posting limits.  Next, you will show up at the lake and struggle to land three or four fish for a day’s work.  However, the fish you did catch looked like footballs, thicker than any you can remember catching.  You figure the bite will be better next trip, right?  Once you have completed this cycle, you have experienced the ‘Berryessa Beatdown’ firsthand.

Once our bite window shut down, Adam and I trolled to several other spots without any luck.  One by one, the nearby boats shot away at full throttle looking for the next hot spot.  I knew they were struggling just like us…but we were marking fish.  I stick by the old rule, “don’t leave fish to find fish”, so we switched back to bass fishing for about an hour.

After picking up only one small spotted bass, we ran back to the kokanee grounds at about 1:30 pm and lowered our lines.  I was immediately marking fish, and when I looked up from the sonar screen, two rods were pumping!  The bite was back on, and we doubled to end the day with limits of delicious kokanee.

After getting a taste of my first Berryessa kokanee action in almost four years, I immediately scheduled another trip the following weekend on August 8th.  This time, Rich Crispi took a break from guiding and jumped onboard my boat.

After we reached our spot, the motor was acting up again.  I had already set up an appointment to have the throttle cables replaced, but it wasn’t scheduled until the following week.  Would the old cables hold out for one last fishing trip?

The motor didn’t want to idle down to its low RPM range.  We were trolling way too fast, even with my trolling plate engaged!  Not wanting to waste time, I shut it off and ran strictly using the bow-mounted electric motor.  That old Minn Kota has seen a lot of fishing in its day, and it struggled to propel us into the morning breeze.  We were only moving at about one mile per hour, but I wanted to get some rods into the water, so we did.

After getting my side rod lowered to 60 feet using the downrigger, I started adding shoepeg corn to my second lure when I saw movement out of my peripheral vision.  “I’m on!” I relayed to Rich as I dropped the corn and grabbed the rod out of its holder.

We landed that fish and continued to catch several others while running extra slowly into the wind.  After a frantic morning bite subsided, I fired up the main motor, and luckily it had returned to normal operation.  I like to run ‘Apex’ style lures between 1.6 and 1.8 miles per hour, and the revived main motor had us back up to speed.

We hit the usual dry spell, but the fish turned back on around 10:00 am, and we were on our way back to Markley Cove by 10:30 am with limits.  It was another stellar morning on the water, with chunky kokanee up to 17.5-inches.

The following week, Rich called me from his boat on the water.  He relayed that the beatdown was back in full effect, as both private boaters and guides were grinding it out to get bit.  All you can do is stay on marks and keep trying different profiles and presentations until the kokanee light switch comes back on.  The experienced anglers have all been there before.

If you are looking for a freshwater excursion to pass the time before kokanee’s bigger cousins invade our river systems, Lake Berryessa is a good challenge.  Be sure to check on the latest mussel and launching restrictions.  I’ll see you out there, and hopefully it will be a hot bite!