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What's up everybody it's Simon from LakeHub. Can you fish below a dam? Maybe
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There's my official answer. Maybe. Depends on three things. Depends on whether it's
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legal to. It depends on whether you can safely access it. And then it also
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depends on how fast it's flowing. So it changes from lake to lake. There are only
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a few lakes that I've come across where it's just straight illegal no fish zone
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below the dam. Most lakes below the dam is actually a really really really good
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fishing spot. Like this one here. You see the spillway is flowing like crazy. The
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lake is up like four feet. But there's plenty people outside here. There's
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people. There's a swim beach over here which is cool. Good place to put in
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kayaks. There's like picnic tables. A lot of people fishing. Dam headwaters like
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a river below the dam is a great place to fish. It's a great place to fish. It's
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usually like a really rich ecosystem. Lots of oxygen going into the water
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There's fish coming out from the lake who are super hungry. And so there's just
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a lot going on. And then the second one is access right? So can you safely and
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legally access it? When I say legally access it what I mean is don't cross any
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private property. Can you get there by parking safely and legally? And can you
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access it via public property? If you can do that you're good. Or if you own the
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property it's private property. It's your property. You can do whatever you want. It's free country. At least it used to be. Enough commentary. So it's legal. You can access
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it. And then if it's safely flowing. Right now this is raging. Wet wading? No
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It is flowing way too fast. It's like it's rapids. It's rapids and it's deep
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which means it's going really fast. So you can check if you're curious what's going
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on. You know generally speaking if it hasn't rained it's gonna be low flow. If
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it has rained it's gonna be high flow. So you can just go off that rule of thumb
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But you can actually check and see what the river is doing because the US
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Geological Society has a service? US Geological Service? USGS. We're gonna go
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with USGS because I know that for a fact that that's right. I don't know if it's
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society or service. I'm guessing it's a service because it's a government agency. And they have sites at every dam that I've ever checked telling you exactly
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what the flow is and what the flow has been. So that's really useful. You can
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actually you can actually get data on like feeder creeks going into the lake
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and stuff for spring spawn data. Really useful. So USGS that's gonna give you
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exactly what the flow is. And here's here's kind of my rule of thumb. 300 to
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500 cubic feet per second. Primo. Go ahead and wet wade that. Go fly fishing or put
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your waders on if it's cold. If it's like a thousand over a thousand, no. This
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river is moving right now. I didn't check to see what it is right now. We just we were just kind of poking around and came down here to check it out. Wanted to do
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this video and way too fast. Can you fish below the dam? It depends. Do a little bit
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of research. A little tiny bit of research. Get out there and fish some waters because those damn fish are looking for you. I'm a dad and that joke
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is qualified. I'm not gonna apologize for it. I'm Simon. Catch you out there
