It’s a beautiful week at Collins Lake. Crowded earlier-than-normal Memorial Day celebrations left a nice quiet mid-week calm as summer starts in earnest. Daytime highs are climbing into the 90’s with surface temperature around 73°F- it’s perfect lake weather! The lake is about 2.5ft below spill, which means we’ll get the south launch, parking & fishing out on the spillway flats open soon, while lakefront campsites are very near the shoreline.

Bass are post-spawn, so activity has dropped off a bit and they’ve spread off the beds. There is plenty of good habitat still underwater around the shoreline, on the east side and still some trees underwater when the islands will eventually emerge. The Engman Family (below) caught a combo of trout and bass fishing with worms along the shoreline at Elmer’s Cove.

Trout fishing tends to move off shore this time of year, but we’ve still seen good catching along the shoreline and trolling as shallow as 10ft within the last two weeks.

John Guerra and Kenny Lee from San Francisco showed off a pair of big rainbow trout caught trolling worms down along the southwest corner of the lake.

Michael Summers (above, left) reeled in a 5.5lb rainbow trout using Berkeley Raddle lure. Riley Caught a nice Lightning Trout from the shore near Road #3 using Powerbait. David Polley caught his big rainbow trout trolling.

Chris Kehoe and Austin caught this trophy 9.1lb Rainbow Trout trolling a blue flickershad along the dam. Cameron caught this 7.5lb rainbow trout on Powerbait in the middle of the lake. Matt Allan caught his big trout at the north end of the beach using a green trout worm. Richard Luke of American Canyon caught a limit of trout trolling the south end of the lake in a kayak below 10ft using a Pink Trix Minnow.

RV camping tends to be pretty busy during summer but you can always check availability here collinslake.com/reservations (click Reserve Online). This week (weekdays) has been pretty quiet which is nice for a change. The weekends around here will be pretty well packed till the end of July, but there is still midweek camping available throughout summer, especially for shorter rigs, dry camping and tents.