SHASTA LAKE : Fishermen Know Its Lure; Others Are Attracted, Too

Its waters come tumbling down from three mountain ranges in tens of thousands of rivulets that in turn become thousands of creeks. Eventually, the creeks become three major rivers, which ultimately become Shasta Lake.

In the 1940s, a massive dam arose in the path of the Sacramento River, in a canyon 12 miles north of Redding. When Shasta Lake filled, around 1944, it became the largest reservoir entirely within California and the major element in the state’s vast Central Valley Water Project.

It also became one of California’s largest aquatic playgrounds. In Northern California, when folks talk about “going to the lake,” chances are they are talking about Shasta Lake. It’s a five-armed monster that looks like a fat spider on a map but which in reality has 365 miles of pine-oak shorelines, just the ticket for a variety of summer vacation activities ranging from bass fishing to houseboating to water-skiing.

The lake is held up by a dam higher than the Washington Monument. At 602 feet, Shasta Dam is one of highest concrete structures ever built in the United States.

Shasta Lake’s arms--the McCloud River Arm alone is 12 miles long--are like fiords, winding their way past high, green mountainsides, dense with oaks, jack and sugar pines. And dominating much of the scenery is California’s most picturesque volcano, 14,162-foot Mt. Shasta, 40 miles to the north.

In a single summer day on Shasta Lake, you can find more people in houseboats than anyplace this side of Lake Powell. In an hour, a Shasta visitor can observe nearly every conceivable form of aquatic recreation vehicle: bass boats, sailboards, water-skis, skiffs, jet skis, sailboats, inner tubes, canoes, kayaks, catamarans and cruisers.

Many enjoy cruising the lake in the early morning, watching and photographing wildlife. Near the shore not far from the Pit River Bridge, a 150-foot-high radio tower, unused for decades, remains a home for ospreys, living in a giant nest atop the tower.

Lately, reports have it that a marine mountain lion has been raiding quiet bays of the McCloud Arm in early mornings, killing ducks.

Houseboaters commonly see Roosevelt elk and black-tailed deer emerging from the tree line in the early morning quiet, then creeping to the lake’s shoreline to drink. Occasionally, a black bear is seen.

Many Shasta vacationers visit Shasta Caverns, a network of limestone-marble caves. The caverns’ entrance is about 800 feet above the lake, not far from the Pit River Bridge. The caverns can be reached only by boat, or by the Cavern Queen, a ferry.

Visitors are taken through a series of limestone chambers, decorated by stalactites and stalagmites. For the more ambitious visitor, spelunking tours are available.

Shasta is laid back. Way back. Examples:

--In the Squaw Creek Arm, a sunburned woman in a bathing suit floated lazily in an inner tube near her family’s houseboat, holding a champagne bottle in one hand and a glass in the other.

--A bass fisherman pulled a rope up the side of his boat and pulled a beer off the six-pack attached to the end of it.

--A passing photographer took a picture of nearly a dozen people in bathing suits atop their houseboat. They stood and hoisted their cocktail glasses, in a toast.

Drinking is a major activity on Shasta Lake, one that often causes considerable problems for law enforcement personnel. There is also a problem with marijuana, which is grown in remote mountain regions above the lake.

Mike Martin of Redding caught a couple of fish on Shasta Lake the other day. Nothing much unusual about that, right? Happens every day.

Martin’s case was a little different, however. He was using 80-pound test line. He was fishing for sturgeon, a prehistoric fish that achieves larger-than-people sizes in the Sacramento River drainage.

In the early 1960s, an early morning fisherman in Shasta Lake’s McCloud Arm found a dead sturgeon on the shore. It weighed about 500 pounds.

“They’ve caught them up to 150 pounds in Shasta, so we know they grow pretty big,” said Don Weidlein, a Redding-based Department of Fish and Game biologist.

“We’re not sure how healthy the sturgeon fishery is on Shasta these days. For one thing, very few people fish for them today. Twenty years ago, it was a much more highly sought fish. Also, some PG&E; projects on the Pit River have changed things like flow velocities and water temperatures and those factors could have impacted their spawning capacities.”

These days, Shasta is a bass fisherman’s lake. Almost any kind of bass. Most catch smallmouths, but largemouth and Alabama spotted bass call Shasta home, too.

Shasta Lake is an annual stop on the pro bass tournament trail, with the last U.S. Bass tournament there drawing about 300 professional fishermen.

“Ninety percent of all the bass caught in Shasta are smallmouths,” said Charley Moss of Redding, a member of the Shasta Cascade Bass Anglers.

Moss’ club is active in creating new bass spawning habitat in Shasta. The work is necessary because Shasta has a fluctuating waterline, due to downstream power and irrigation demands. The Shasta Cascade Bass Anglers periodically tie up bundles of brush, manzanita and small trees and sink them in shoreline areas, providing cover for juvenile bass. “Shasta is an aging reservoir, and it’s lost a lot of its natural woody cover over the last 40 years,” Moss said. “Our habitat work is effective.

“Alabama spotted bass were planted in Shasta in 1980 because they do well in reservoirs with widely fluctuating water levels. They’ve done so well, they’re already a significant percentage of the bass catch.

“You can catch largemouths just about all over the lake, near tree stumps, brushy stickups or off rocky points. If you’re fishing exclusively for them, you’ll find them. But if you’re just fishing for bass, you’ll catch 90% smallmouths, because you find them just about everywhere.

“Smallmouths are kamikaze-type bass, they’ll hit a wide variety of baits and lures. Largemouths are somewhat harder to catch, they’re more fussy.

“Our topwater bass action usually starts by early April. When the water reaches 60 degrees, that almost always means we’re surface fishing”

On a recent afternoon on Shasta, a writer and photographer watched a houseboat on the lake’s McCloud River Arm cruising slowly upstream with a satellite dish mounted on the roof, aimed at the heavens. Outside, under hot, sunny skies, water-skiers sped by, laughing and shouting behind fast ski boats. But inside the houseboat, folks watched TV, drinking cocktails.

Speaking of cocktails, that’s where Sgt. Ron Richardson of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Dept. comes in.

In a Shasta County Sheriff’s Dept. boat, he was patrolling Shasta Lake. In the Pit River Arm, he pointed to an area where several water-ski boats zipped about at high speed, throwing up rooster tails of white water.

“Roughly 95% of every boat you see on this lake has alcoholic beverages aboard,” he said. “Statewide, the number of boating accident fatalities that are alcohol-related is about 59%. On Shasta, it’s about 70%. But we’ve cut way back on alcohol-related accidents here with a new program we’re quite proud of.

“When it’s a 100-degree day and a guy in a boat has been doing 50 m.p.h. for a couple of hours, he has watery, bloodshot eyes from the wind. It’s more difficult to detect drunkenness in him than it is in a guy in a car, where you can get him out of the car and see him walk. But we’ve started our own program of under-the-influence detection, and it’s worked.”

Shasta County’s program consists of on-board sobriety tests involving finger dexterity and finger-to-nose drills, and hand-slap tests.

Richardson has presented boating alcohol abuse instruction courses to marine law enforcement personnel in Oregon, Florida, Nevada and Virginia. In 1982, he said, the year before Shasta’s program started, there were 150 alcohol-related accidents on the lake. The next year, after the program was implemented, there were 99. It was down to 77 in 1984. Statistics weren’t counted for 1985 because it was a low-water year and Shasta boat traffic was significantly lower.

Shasta area visitors who enjoy hiking through the lake’s mountain woodlands have also been warned they can be in danger by folks associated with intoxicants of another kind.

Last March, the state of California issued an “outdoor alert” in the form of a Resources Agency brochure warning visitors to 10 northern counties of their personal safety in remote regions where marijuana is cultivated. The brochure points out that marijuana growers protect their gardens “with devices that can inflict serious injury or death.”

The 10 counties are Shasta, Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity, Santa Cruz, Butte, Santa Barbara, Sonoma, Siskiyou and Tehama.

Shasta County Sheriff’s Sgt. Tom Jaharis says there is at least one raid on a remote marijuana garden every day in Shasta County. He advises hikers in the Shasta Lake area to look for a couple of warning signs.

“A well-worn foot trail in the middle of nowhere could be a warning sign,” he said. “Then, if you also start seeing plastic irrigation pipes, any kind of fencing or trip wires, it’s time to leave that area and call the Sheriff’s office.”

On Shasta, houseboating is an industry. There are 12 houseboat operations on Shasta Lake marinas and roughly 450 houseboats for rent. And the good news for summer of ’86 houseboaters is that no reservations are necessary.

“It’s been a relatively slow season,” reports Steve Barry of Holiday Harbor Marina.

“It used to be we needed reservations up to a year ahead of time. We used to be 100% booked from June 15 through Labor Day. This summer, on any given day, I’ve got five to seven boats tied up at the dock, with no one’s name on them.”

Last year’s low-water summer reduced the size of the lake, and created an exposed, moderately unsightly shoreline, Barry said.

“A low-water year hurts us for more than one summer,” he said. “People who come to Shasta every summer will learn a low-water summer is coming up, and they’ll say: ‘Let’s do something else this summer.’ They do, and maybe the following summer they come back to Shasta, but maybe they don’t.

“Our business develops from people who first come to Shasta as campers. After two or three visits, they say to themselves: ‘Say, those houseboats look like fun, you can go anywhere on the lake--let’s do that next time.’ ”