Casitas lake boat closure dates

[Kelly Ripa]

Since everything is a frick'n secret at this lake I found out the hard way this morning that the lake was closed to boating today. The guy in front of me drove 3 hours one direction for the bad news I only went 6 miles round trip. He towed the boat 6 hours round trip for nothing. Ka-ching costly but they never said jack about it. The info is taped to a window you drive past to have your boat's transom available to the staff.It was never distributed to the locked in boaters.
The Lake is closed on these dates:
Sept 16
Sept 29 until noon
Oct. 4
Oct. 14
Oct. 27
Nov. 2
This is due to the fact that there is a cross country race course involving the roads and the launch ramp at Coyote Creek with high school kids and parents everywhere.Some more of the excellent and brilliant work by staff and management.

[mark poulson]

Damn!

[pd]

Ridiculous. It can’t be easy being a Casitas guy these days. Let’s hope the lake springs back into shape next year.

[Kelly Ripa]

I'm on the fence with maybe selling my bass boat and buying 3 or 4 used tin boats that I can leave around the state. SPRING is the keyword. However I've never gone 4 months without a fish. True I had 2 broken ribs and missed the end of May. The dying 5 pound fish from my last visit has my brains spinning still. I'm linking the fire retardant to the crawfish to the larger predators . Maybe that's why the larger fish are simply gone after they spawned. If those chemicals where absorbed by them and transferred....the bass are getting concentrations of something? Pure speculation but the fish that rarely eat crawfish seem to have exploded. And the one that died while I worked on it last week was puffed up like a puffer fish with a red rash to it's underbelly was fine looking otherwise. I can always wonder while casting and retrieving and remembering the crowds of 8 pound fish. I looked back to 07 in the Casitas reports. I had like 22.5 lbs for 11th place one july while fishing with a rookie who was paying for the whole thing....

I think something like 37 won it as it was a night deal with W.O.N 50 odd boats

[stickbait]

Since everything is a frick'n secret at this lake I found out the hard way this morning that the lake was closed to boating today. The guy in front of me drove 3 hours one direction for the bad news I only went 6 miles round trip. He towed the boat 6 hours round trip for nothing. Ka-ching costly but they never said jack about it. The info is taped to a window you drive past to have your boat's transom available to the staff.It was never distributed to the locked in boaters.
The Lake is closed on these dates:
Sept 16
Sept 29 until noon
Oct. 4
Oct. 14
Oct. 27
Nov. 2
This is due to the fact that there is a cross country race course involving the roads and the launch ramp at Coyote Creek with high school kids and parents everywhere.Some more of the excellent and brilliant work by staff and management.

The silliness of this state is deep..... Hire a couple retired guys for crossing guards...like they do in front of schools.... Just how many people (runners) are going to be there early am when most boaters show up anyway....

[WRB]

There are some signs of bass life with a few caught the last ABA tournament.
What Casitas needs is a electro shock study by the DFW and everyone interested should demand a population survey.
Maybe a Western Bass petition on this site could get the ball rolling?
Casitas was my favorite lake since it opened in 1958 and fish there thousands of hours very successfully. I am 80 now and don’t have the energy to spearhead this task, but it needs to be started now!

Tom

[Kelly Ripa]

Crossing guards... Sorry but a third of the course is right down the middle of the road length wise that they closed off. It doesn't matter when they get there. They have the back half of the lake and it's infrastructure( facilities ) so they can have multi school events for the day. Stupid yes, but it's been going on now for I think three years. The stupid part is not TELLING anyone. I drive past where they have the notice hung looking in my rear view mirror as I go by so I can get the transom lined up with the kiosk where they remove the seal and send you on your 2 mile drive to the launch ramp which is in part the race course.It would cost $.02 cents each to have handed a slip of paper out to the locked boaters...But that's $.02 cents to much.

If you remember Tom. I was saying the same thing "shock the thing" just a few months ago. They used to stock the SoCal Hawg trough at the boat shows with our fish, I don't think a 1.33 avr. for 6 fish from 36 anglers efforts is healthy or impressive to say the least. I want to see some mature fish. So lets shock this ol' girl and find out how bad the damage is. A 1.33 bass is living in the shad schools like a trout...6 lbs. or better would starve to death chasing shad. I would have thought the better fish would have been cannibalistic which was one of the first rabbit holes I went down after the end of the two week topwater bite at the ending of the spawn ( fry guards ) and the beginning of the post spawn. NO LOVE!
The DFG told the Casitas board they were going to gut them for what they did to the entire state and they have left us to our selves ever since.Nobodies coming to help or even look at this. That I guarantee.

All we'll have are memories Tom. It might as well be Camelot now.

[WRB]

The DFW has a duty to survey lake Casitas regardless of squabbles with the crazy Ojai water board members. Casitas isn't a Private lake it’s a Public lake!
Casitas was a world class bass fishery and deserves to be operated as such. This year 2023 is the lowest point in bass catch per man hour since Casitas open to public fishing, that should concern the DFW.
Casitas has been closed for sporting events in the past most notable being the Olympic Games.
It’s the fishery health that should concern every bass angler.
Yes I have faded memories of phenomenal bass fishing at Casitas and Castaic, both a shadow of their glory days.
Tom