Russian River Fishing Report

Report Updated Feb. 4, 2012

SUPER CROWDED!

The river is getting hammered with pressure right now! If you can avoid a weekend, you’ve got a better shot…last Sunday, there were 32 boats on the Memorial to Steelhead Beach stretch alone! Plus, tons of bankies. Now, there are definitely some nice steelies around, but you have to zig when everybody else zags to try to find fish that haven’t been beaten up. No small proposition, but it can be done as we’ve heard some pretty decent scores from the boats that managed to get away from folks and either drift bait or pull plugs.

Making things tougher is the fact that the water is dropping out fairly quickly…

About the Russian River

Okay, so with the derelict car bodies along the banks and the plastic from the vineyards hanging from the trees, you’re not going to mistake the Russian for the Babine, but scenery aside, the river still produces some excellent steelie fishing in the winter months. In particular, the stretch immediately below the mouth of Dry Creek (near Healdsburg) holds a lot of hatchery steelies as they wait to run up the tributary and into the fish ladder.

But you don’t have to fish with the masses. There’s plenty of water upstream through the Alexander Valley to explore. Up or down river, the biggest problem here is that when it rains, the river can be a muddy and unfishable for weeks.

In the spring months, you’ll find a modest American shad run below Johnson’s and Memorial dams in the lower river. The overgrown herring can arrive as early as Easter and run into early June and produce spurts of good action for fly and spin anglers alike. Come summer, the river is overtaken by innertubes, canoes and swimmers but there’s a pretty solid smallmouth bass fishery throughout the drainage if you don’t mind trading quality for quantity.

Stupid Boat Tricks on the Russian!
Shad Fishing 101