Fish Guide Has Earned His Stripes : Lake Havasu: It has been a big year for striped-bass fishing on this popular desert lake that borders California and Arizona.

It’s still dark and the world seems asleep. The lake is quiet, its glassy surface disturbed only by a few grebes ducking their heads underwater in search of small fish, or by an occasional carp swirling its mighty tail.

Or by Bob Lee cruising up and down the waterway in search of striped bass.

It has been a busy fall for Lee, a fishing guide whose boat is often the first one on the lake. His customers have come here all the way from the East Coast and Deep South, from as far away as Australia.

The striped bass bite this year has been one of the best. And Lee can’t stop talking about the voracious feeders that boiled on the surface for four hours during an outing a couple of weeks back--of the 25 he and partner Ron Lockhart “popped” and the 20 or so that got away.

“Oh, you should have been here then,” Lee said. And he repeated it often.

Striped bass have a strong following at Lake Havasu, particularly in fall when the weather is hospitable and the fish active on the surface.

“When they’re on top, feeding on shad, it can take off any time,” Lee said. “A lot of times, if you just watch, it’ll bust wide open just like a tuna or bonito boil.”

No such feeding frenzy was likely this time out, though.

The lake had recently “turned over,” a phenomenon that occurs every now and then. The warm water on the surface had mixed with the colder water below, the bottom had been stirred up and the normally clear lake had become a murky mess.

Strong winds also had blown for two days, scattering the lake’s population of shad. Thousands of threadfin shad roam the lake and can sometimes be seen as a thrashing boil on the surface. Striped bass, which feed heartily on shad, are generally found nearby.

Given the conditions, however, Lee, 53, who has fished this man-made reservoir almost daily for the last 20 years, figured that a sheltered bank along the California shore--the lake splits the California-Arizona border--might offer the best chance.

“The shad might have concentrated there,” he said.

After meeting Lockhart, Lee motored his 20-foot boat slowly south, along the Chemehuevi Indian reservation. Lockhart followed in his pontoon boat.

The sun was just beginning to light the sky when the first stop was made, near the Grass Island area. There were no noticeable signs of shad, though, and the first few casts, with an assortment of lures, produced no strikes.

But after a short move down the gravel-lined bank, Lee’s silver spoon produced a couple of hits, and one largemouth bass in the four-pound class, which was released.

“That’s a money fish,” said Lockhart, his mind on a bass tournament to be held here.

Lee then hooked and landed a small striper. Lockhart lost a bigger one at the stern of his boat before eventually landing about a three-pounder. But the bite ended there.

Lee moved a short distance to the Black Rock area on the Arizona side and decided to try another method: jigging spoons near the underwater brush he had metered at about 35 feet.

That method didn’t produce so he proceeded quickly south to Pilot Rock, a lava rock landmark that indicates to westbound boaters a dramatic turn of the river to the north.

Here, Lee reverted to the generally productive, but less exciting, method of catching stripers: stationary fishing with dead anchovies thrown over the side.

By now, the sun was up and the lake was coming alive, speedboats pulling skiers at break-neck speeds, jet-skiers having their noisy fun, houseboats lumbering up and down the river.

The increasing activity wouldn’t affect the fishing if the people kept their distance, Lee said, and he apparently was right.

About a dozen stripers were caught in an hour’s time, the biggest a three-pounder by Lockhart. A few channel catfish were hauled up from the lake’s bottom, and subsequently released.

Resting under the morning sun, Lee talked of better days and the bigger fish known to inhabit the reservoir.

He recalled the time he sold a woman a fishing license at his nearby tackle store. She caught a 30-pound striper just as the boat she was fishing from had gotten under way.

“She had told me before, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. I hate fishing. I’m only doing this to please my husband,’ ” Lee said, shaking his head.

He mentioned the 30-pounder he caught in the mid-1970s. The 59-pound 12-ounce fish caught upriver near Bullhead City, which for a while was a world-record striper in the landlocked waterway category.

He recalled catching nine stripers during a 45-minute surface bite just before the lake turned over, and predicted good prospects when the lake eventually settles.

But time and again, Lee brought up the four-hour surface bite he had encountered two weeks before.

“I really wish you could have come up here then,” he said again.

This industrial-resort community has grown lots since Lake Havasu was created with the completion of Parker Dam in 1938. It has grown particularly since developer Robert P. McCulloch bought the famous London Bridge and had it installed in town, block by block--it was called the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle and cost about $8 million.

The population was 240 in 1964. The bridge that began carrying traffic across England’s river Thames in 1831 was reopened here in 1971 and Lake Havasu City has grown rapidly ever since. The population now is about 21,000 and at any given time there are between 40,000 and 60,000 people in town for one reason or another.

The famous bridge and the English village beneath it, complete with black taxis, double-deck buses and red telephone boxes, is second only to the Grand Canyon as an Arizona tourist attraction. And the carnival atmosphere created by this bit of England, arid as it is, has done wonders for the city.

But far more important to Lake Havasu City, and its success as a tourist attraction are the reservoir’s 39 square miles and the once-mighty Colorado River to the north and south.

Watersports and recreational opportunities abound.

The Havasu National Wildlife Refuge, dedicated to the preservation and management of the Pacific Flyway, is home to more than 290 species of birds. Eagles, gulls, geese and ducks ply the skies above, as do swans, herons and the endangered Yuma clapper rail. A sprawling wetlands is home to beavers, muskrats and otters.

Bighorn sheep roam a protected range on the Arizona side just north of Havasu and are often seen by passers-by on various watercraft. Coyotes, bobcats and even the elusive mountain lion have been seen along the river’s shores.

So popular has Lake Havasu become--primarily among Californians--that it has the unfortunate distinction of having the highest number of boating-related injuries reported on any stretch of the Colorado’s 1,000-mile shoreline.

It also has become one of the more stable fisheries on the lower Colorado, even more so than lakes Mead and Powell, its counterparts to the north.

Striped bass were introduced into all three reservoirs in the late 1960s. But unlike Mead and Powell, Havasu has had a relatively healthy population of stripers ever since.

“For some reason, the stripers in Lake Havasu never out-foraged their forage species,” said Brad Jacobson, regional fisheries specialist for Arizona’s Game and Fish Department. “In Powell and Lake Mead, the stripers got on top of the shad to a point that (the shad disappeared and the stripers) became very skinny and their condition factors dropped.”

In Havasu, Jacobson said, the shad population always “bounces back to the point where the stripers never totally overrun them.”

The crappie, bluegill and channel catfish populations are in good shape, too, and carp are so abundant that officials encourage the taking of as many as possible. However, despite the species’ strength and size--the lake record is 42 pounds--the carp can’t seem to shake its trash fish image and are not targeted by many.

In fact, Havasu’s only problem species, aside from the federally protected razorback sucker, has been the largemouth bass.

In 1984, the largemouth numbers had declined to such alarming levels that officials instituted a 13-inch size limit and began extensive habitat restoration programs.

Since then, the largemouth bass appears to have rebounded.

“It’s starting to look real good,” Jacobson said. “It’s had quite a turnaround.”

Lee and Lockhart will attest to that. But first, let them tell you about the striped bass . . .