Okay, 2015 fishing report for Standley Lake in Westminster, Colorado.  I know there are a couple of Bass Resource members in the area.

 

I am boat-challenged and thusly handicapped... but wow.  The bass fishing this year has been awful.  I do not know if it was the unusually rainy spring (and the very late spawn that came with that), but it seems to me that the lake is not up to par.

 

The southwest end of the lake where the bass were plentiful in 2014 is... for lack of a better word... dead.  The lily pads still have not appeared and the weeds I can see from the shore are brown, not that healthy green color.  The canal inlet from Clear Creek has not been opened, so the bass are not moving into that part of the lake as often as they did last year.

 

I would guess the oxygen content has got to be on the poor side.

 

Westminster stocked the lake with 6500 catchable trout in April... but no bass as in past years.

 

As always, the pleasure boaters churn up the water against the eroded shoreline... turning the water from very clear to chocolate milk in less than a couple of hours.  I get two good hours of top-water fishing in the morning before that happens and that is when I have caught the two bass... the only two bass... so far this year. 

 

Fishing shallow (one to four feet) has produced nothing regardless of the lures I use (crank bait, jerk bait, spinner bait, etc... thinking about chatter bait for this weekend, though).  It is hard to efficiently fish any deeper than that from the shore.  Anything I might drag across the bottom gets too much attention from the carp.

 

My guess is that the bass are staying deep this year and, if you want to catch bass in Standley Lake... bring a boat.

 

 

A buddy bought a kayak and has done fairly well from it at Standley. That's a rather inexpensive alternative and probably the most affordable way to get you off the bank and into the lake, other than in a belly boat.  I haven't fished Standley this year myself so I can't give you any firsthand info.  You might also check with FishExplorer.com and ColoradoFisherman.com.   

Most of the good fish we caught last year were on 5"-6" swim baits and any soft plastic resembling a craw in green pumpkin. Tubes and Senkos have usually been productive too.