# Panguitch Lake 06/07/2014



## Flyfish4thrills (Jan 2, 2008)

On Friday 6/7 we began fishing Panguitch Lake around 9am. I was amazed at the number of boats and shore fisherman. Yes, it was free-fishing day, but I would have expected more of the crowd to be non-boaters. 

Immediately after we launched the boat, we noticed that a couple of pontoon boat fisherman were doing well. As they were dressed in fly gear we assumed they were catching them on flies. As we got closer, we saw that even though they were dressed up as flyfisherman, they were actually bait fishing with spin rods. They were having excellent luck, catching and releasing a rainbow each about every 10 minutes. They had an interesting setup. They had on a silver dodger followed by a few feet of leader then orange powerbait. They were in 40 ft of water, almost motionless, allowing the lure/bait to sink deep. They retrieved the line like a spinner, with the line appearing to be almost vertical. I found it to be an interesting technique--definitely productive. 

Though legal, I personally don't agree with catch and release when using bait. I believe it is more like catch and kill. I heard one of them say, "Hey this time the hook only caught him in the side of the mouth!" like it was a very rare occurrence. I wonder how many fish die with "catch and release" bait fishing? I personally would like to see the regulations change such that if you are bait fishing, you must keep all legal size fish and then stop fishing. Only allow catch and release if with flies or artificial lures. I also disagree with bait fishing when a body of water is regulated with a slot. What percent of the fish are in the slot? How many of those are caught with bait and killed/"released"? How many cutts are taken because there are confused as bows? That is one of my peeves about Panguitch Lake -- how politics trumps biology.

I was impressed with seeing a DWR employee asking boaters questions about where their boats had been previously due to the quagga mussel problem. A few weeks previous, we had been to Newcastle and there was a different DWR employee there doing the same thing. They took notes with a small tablet and even took a picture of our boat permit number. I believe if this was done at every boating lake it would make a difference. You can lie about where your boat has been, but you can't get around a scan or a photo. To some it may not appear economically feasible but compared to the cost of the end result of quagga mussels everywhere, it seems reasonable. 

I have fished at certain lakes in other states that were used for drinking water. If you wanted to use a boat on that particular lake, you could only use that boat on that single water and none other to prevent contaminating the drinking water with undesired items from other waters. So if you had to boat fish and had to fish that lake, you chose only that lake or you had 2 boats. This could be done here. If you want to fish a contaminated water, you must use a boat that only stays at that water. They had a special permit and sticker attached to the boat that was easily damaged if removed. If seen/scanned at another lake you would incur a massive fine. 

We saw on our fishfinder that there were many fish at the 20 - 35 ft range. There were also many in the first 5 feet but those are hard to see on the fish finder (know they were there based on catch rate). Shore fishing appeared to be very slow...didn't see a single catch by a shore angler. 90% of boat fisherman were bait fishing. The 2 boats we spoke with had fair fishing but not fast....about 6 fish per boat during the heat of the day for one boat and 6 in the evening for another boat.

We had a really good day for Panguitch Lake. Between 2 of us, we caught over 40 then lost count--likely came close to 50. We fished from 9am to sunset. We used many different techniques. We started out catching a fair amount of cutts trolling with leaded line (3 - 7 colors at 2 - 2.5mph) using various plugs. Brown trout imitating colors worked best. Getting bored of that we swapped to fly poles (not my favorite when on a boat...I prefer kick boats when fly-fishing). We only caught a few dragging flies between 0.5 - 1.2 mph (drifting with the wind) on type 3 sinking line. Type 5 would have been better due to the depth (in my opinion). The few flies that were successful included green and black wooly buggers and muddler minnows. 

The wind came up, the rain clouds came in (no rain on the lake...it all went around us luckily) and with the sun behind the clouds we decided to fish the shallows (4 - 15ft). At first in the south east and then in the western shallows, we caught quite a few cutts on small (to not sink into the weeds), gold colored spinners: meps, small blue foxes, etc. We considered changing over to floating/intermediate flyline and maybe sinking heads or bead head flies but felt lazy. We moved up to larger hardware such as gold kastmasters and caught larger fish. Then we sized up even more to jointed rapalas. We kept catching larger fish (surprised at the small cutts that will hit a large rapala) until I stopped at a j-9 brown trout jointed rapala....the best lure of the day. I wish I had larger ones with me. The sun came out and the bite in the shallows ended. I assume that when the water heats up in the summer you won't find too many large fish in there (it currently is in the high 50's to low 60's).

Near sunset, the best lures were silver/blue kastmasters to catch a mix of bows and cuts that were in the surface water feeding. We didn't try dries...didn't see much surface activity and again, we were lazy. We decided to leave that for our next pontoon trip.

I almost forgot. The majority of the fish caught were cutts 60/40. They were between 15 - 19 1/2 inches long (plus a few babies caught in the shallows with the others...amazed they would strike our lures). Bows were between 14 - 17 inches long but the larger ones seemed to put on the weight, not length. We didn't bother to weigh, but some of the bows were thick "footballs" like otter creek. We only kept 2 larger bows to fry up this week.

Happy fishing!


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