Ep. 43: Fred Klinshaw of Fred Klinshaw Fishing on Lake Casitas, the Refill Effect & 200-Fish Days

Guest: Fred Klinshaw (Fred Klinshaw Fishing)

Hosts: Daniel Dahlin ([FISH]rx), El Charly, Luke Dean (Bait Slingers / Artemis Charters)

Lake Casitas bass fishing just changed. In Episode 43, recorded live on May 21, 2024, SoCal freshwater guide Fred Klinshaw — nine years on the water — breaks down exactly what that means for how the fish are living, spawning, and being caught right now.

In This Episode

• Why Lake Casitas at full capacity changes every presentation: weedless, suspending, or topwater only — the submerged timber won’t allow anything else
• The new-lake food chain: how flooding rebuilds a fishery from the bottom up and why every fish coming out right now is a fat football
• Why bass spawned at 30 feet as the lake rose, nearly zero fry mortality, and what a 200-fish day on double fluke rigs looks like
• How forward-facing sonar changes guiding at depth: watching bass chase and reject crankbaits on beds 30 feet down, on screen, in real time
• Tannin fouling: what happened when Casitas rose 75 feet in one season and why it’s not an issue at full capacity
• Fred’s controlled scent testing with Hammer Sauce: 6:1 and 3:0 catch ratios in the same session, same gear, same conditions
• Fred’s saltwater roots: Oxnard harbors, sand bass, calicos, and spotties before freshwater took over — and why he still sees the connection
• How nine years of guiding changed his relationship to catching fish vs. helping clients catch fish

What a full Lake Casitas means for bass fishing

Casitas sat low for over 20 years. During the drought, the exposed lakebed grew trees — some with trunks 8 to 10 inches across. When the lake refilled, all of that went underwater. Fred is now fishing through a forest. Every presentation has to be weedless, suspending, or topwater. Drop-through nose hooks and unguarded jigs don’t survive a cast. That’s not a temporary adjustment. That’s the lake now.

When the lake rose fast — about 75 feet in one season — the rotting brush fouled the water for six months. The lake was at 29% and jumped to 70% in that window. At full capacity now, the sheer size of the lake changes the equation. Wind moves across more surface. Currents oxygenate more water. Fred’s take is that the fouling problem belongs to a smaller lake, not this one.

Spawn depth, fry survival, and the 200-fish day

As the lake rose, bass moved their beds deeper. Fred watched them on forward-facing sonar — beds at 30 feet, fish chasing crankbaits and turning back, visible on screen. At that depth, bird predation drops out entirely. The fry survival rate was unlike anything he’d seen in years of guiding Casitas. Schools of 8–10 inch bass appeared mid-column, not in brush, and they were hungry.

Fred was running double fluke rigs to handle the volume. 50, 100, 200 fish days in four to eight hour trips. He was upfront with clients: if you’re coming to Casitas right now, this is what you’re catching. Most of them didn’t care. Bent all day on small fish is still bent all day. Those fish are now pushing a pound. The cycle from that unusual spawn is still playing out, and the quality is building.

The new-lake food chain and why every fish is a football

Flooding doesn’t just add water. It adds forage. Insects, rodents, organic material from the newly submerged lakebed kick off a plankton bloom. Zooplankton feed on that. Small fish feed on zooplankton. Bass feed on everything. Fred described it as an unlimited food supply — and you can see it in the fish. Every bass coming out of Casitas right now, even the 10–12 inch ones, are round. “Big footballs” was his term. No stunted growth. Clean, fat fish at every size class.

The connection to salt is direct. Matching the forage, reading where bait is holding in the water column, adjusting presentation to suspended fish rather than structure-bound fish — these are the same decisions that come up in SoCal harbor and back bay fishing. Fred came up through saltwater, fished the Ventura coast and local harbors before moving to freshwater. He sees the crossover clearly, and this episode is where he starts explaining it.

Scent testing and what the numbers actually mean

Fred spent time developing Hammer Sauce as a fishing scent and ran controlled comparisons to validate it. Same rod, same reel, same line, same hook, same bait, two anglers on the same lake. One with scent, one without. The results were 6:1 and 3:0 in favor of the scent across two tests in the same session. Then he switched the anglers. The results followed the scent.

The mechanism he keeps coming back to is hold time. Fish that bite and release in a split second don’t get hooked. Scent that makes them hold the bait a beat longer converts more bites into fish. He also tested it on bed bass — nearly every time, pulling the bait and reapplying scent before the second cast turned a follow into a committed eat. Hammer Sauce is oil-based and FDA-certified. At the time of recording it was stocked at Eric’s Tackle, Performance Tackle, Fishing Fools, Tackle Express, and Bob Sands.

Why This Episode Matters

Casitas is not a normal lake right now and it hasn’t been for a couple of years. Fred has been guiding it through every stage of the refill — the fouling, the deep spawn, the baby bass explosion, and now the transition into quality fish. There isn’t another guide in Southern California who has watched this process as closely, and this episode is the clearest documentation of it.

The scent testing section is also worth time. Fred didn’t just claim it worked — he built a controlled methodology on a working lake with paying clients and documented the results. Whether you use scent or not, the framework he describes for testing any variable (same gear, swapped between anglers, same conditions) is the right way to think about what’s actually making a difference on the water.

Fred returned to Time On The Water in Ep. 130, by which point his operation had expanded to Castaic and Pyramid. That episode covers the coastal spawn-lag framework and the salt-fresh crossover in depth. This one is where the Casitas story starts.

Watch the full episode on the Time On The Water YouTube channel. New episodes every Tuesday at 6 PM.