TAILWATERS AND TIDEWATERS BEAT SUMMER BLAHS: PART ONE TAILWATER

Are conditions ever perfect. Right now New Jersey fishing has flooded out, and they've closed Montana and a lot of other spots in the west due to raging fires. In open waters the temperatures are usually too hot. So what's the answer for summer. Simple, it's tailwaters and tidewaters

Tailwaters are simply streams that flow out from dams. In most cases the intake section for power dams is well under the surface. This means that the deeper water comes out colder. In some cases it's so cold that it must be warmed in a wide, shallow afterbay before it's released downstream. Otherwise the native warm water fish would die.

In other cases, like Arkansas's White River, tailwaters cool just enough to b ideal for trout. Such isn't uncommon all over the South, either. So if your impoundment's too warm instead of going deep go downstream to tailwater.

Tailwater also serves up a couple of other advantages. First, even with fish screens and such, turbines and spillways deliver up stunned or chopped up baitfish to predators who wait below. Then too tailwaters below dams collect upstream migrants. In some cases fish ladders to a fair job of allowing salmon or steelhead to climb towards their natal streams. In others dams act as stoppers.

In both cases fish collect in the deep water where the spillway and turbine outlets have dug holes in the river bottom. In some cases this water is accessible from the bank -- considerable caution is needed to avoid radical changes in flows and water depth. In other cases boaters and ease in and anchor in slackwater between outflows. Here too, caution is needed.

In a few spots "deadlines" below the dam bar upstream angler access. Creative types have beat these with surf sticks that allow very long casts or even radio controlled boats that putt-putt bait or plugs up to the prime spots where the angler jerks the bait or lure free and fishes it back. I'm told, but haven't seen that this is so popular on a few Midwest tailwaters that there are considerable problems with conflicting radio control channals.

By whatever method it's clear that tailwaters produce when surface waters are too warm or stream flows too sluggish. Do, once it starts to rain, consider tailwaters too. As a rule, impoundments don't mud up immediately and just below dams tailwaters lack the tributaries that muddy the water. So in spots like the Low Flow section of The Feather River below Oroville, there can be several miles of fishable water when most California streams look like chocolate milk. Can't get better than that.

Go To Page: 1

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic