Guide Troy Folkestad lips a nice Otay bass that hit a jig-n-pig crawled slowly over a big rockpile near the mouth of the Harvey Arm. Photo by Richard Alden Bean.

Shaped like a large letter T lying on its side, the Otay arm of the lake stretches north, while the Harvey Arm points east. The dam tips the end of the southern arm of the lake.

Otay has a little bit of everything in the way of bass-holding structure. There are tules and plenty of shoreline brush.

The Harvey Arm has a number of submerged trees along the now-covered stream channel, and there are plenty of rock piles and coarse rubble on the bottom to hold bass.

With good cover and a great food supply, Otay’s bass are numerous and healthy. While the largemouths come in the normal mix of sizes, anglers who fish this lake regularly will tell you that some really big largemouth are roaming this lake. Bass up to more than 12 pounds were caught recently.

FLORIDA STRAINS
The Florida-strain fish in Otay and most other San Diego City lakes grow larger than their northern-strain counterparts.

Bringing them to San Diego was the brainstorm of Orville Ball, the city’s second fishery director, and a group of local sportsmen who banded together for the task in 1959.

A shipment of 204,000 fingerling Florida bass was stocked in smaller Upper Otay and then moved to several other area lakes, including Lower Otay. They quickly grew to impressive size, and anglers flocked to the area in search of a fish that might break the long-standing record for largemouth bass, which was set in 1932.

Over the years, Otay has produced some prodigious largemouths. While not breaking the national record, Otay has turned out largemouths weighing more than 18 pounds.

It continues to be a good bass lake, capable of surprising anglers with bass over 10 pounds at any time.

LURES, BAIT
The prime forage base for Otay’s bass is threadfin shad and bluegills, with good populations of crappie and a fair number of crayfish as well.

This would seem to make Otay a great crankbait lake, but over the years, soft-plastics have produced most of the big bass.

This trend was so prevalent over the last couple of decades that the lake had a special plastic worm named after it. The Otay Special is a brown translucent worm with a black stripe of vein running its length.

Combinations of solid black, green, brown and blue all work well.

Otay is also a lake where live crayfish are highly popular, and now there’s a new wrinkle. Starting last year, trout are being stocked in Otay during the cooler winter months. This is the result of increased funding to the state’s trout hatchery system.

The addition of trout also has created an opportunity for anglers to hunt trophy largemouths with the huge plugs and soft-plastic swimbaits designed to mimic planted rainbows.

Troy Folkestad, who guides anglers on many Southern California lakes, is an expert big-bass fisherman.

“In my opinion, you can fish swimbaits successfully even if there are no trout in the lake,” said Folkestad, the son of bass tournament champion Mike Folkestad.

“They don’t have trout in the trophy-bass lakes in Mexico, and I caught big bass on swimbaits down there.”

He said it doesn’t matter what the bass think the lure is. To them, it’s just bigger prey, and that gets their attention.

“Bass are opportunistic creatures,” he said, “and if there’s something there that’s the right size, they’ll eat it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a crappie, a bluegill, a trout or another bass. If it has the size they are looking for and the right profile to appear alive, they’ll eat it.”