When the water-skiers arrive, you don’t have to get off the water. Fish the mud lines for good bass action. Here, Marc Mitrany hoists a Castaic largemouth bass. Photo by Chris Shaffer.

In the summer, bass fishing tends to slow drastically in Southern California, where temperatures make a habit of breaching 100 degrees.

The heat tends to send anglers off to the beaches and pools. Meanwhile, bass retreat to deeper water that’s cooler and has more oxygen.

Fortunately, not all of Southern California’s bass reservoirs go dormant when school is out of session. In fact, though trophy fish might not be common, a handful of reservoirs offer anglers a chance to catch decent numbers of bass during late summer.

“If you want to catch bass in August in Southern California,” said Mike Giusti, California Department of Fish and Game supervising biologist, “you’ve got to go with the ones that don’t allow recreational use like water-skiing, or those that allow only limited use.”

Giusti said he’d stay away from Casitas and Cachuma because of the new invasive-species boat restrictions. But he said there are a handful of lakes where the boat traffic doesn’t matter -- like Castaic.

Here’s a rundown of five waters that are best bets for summer bass fishing.

LOWER OTAY RESERVOIR
Even though Otay’s 50-pound-plus blue catfish have been garnering the attention this year, the reservoir’s bass population is in excellent shape.

Giusti believes that here, the lack of personal watercraft lends a hand to anglers during the peak of the summer heat season.

“I’m guessing Otay will be the same it’s always been,” said the fisheries expert. “There’s a good number of large fish in there, and a lot of smaller fish that you’ll likely catch during the summer months.”

Otay’s bass grow by eating shad, bluegill and trout and often use the lake’s tules for shelter. However, if the water levels keep falling, many of the tules will likely be on dry ground.

This will force bass to find other structure to hide in -- and make it easier for bass anglers with quality electronics to find them.

“I would think the water would be out of the tules, but you get a lot of bass breaking on balls of shad in the summer,” said Giusti.

When stumbling upon schools of shad, anglers can cast hair-raiser jigs and silver spoons or topwaters. Otherwise, plan on fishing topwater baits shallow in the morning when a surface bite can be expected.

The topwater bite should be all around the reservoir and continue till about 10 a.m. Then, try fishing plastics 10 to 30 feet deep around drop-offs and rocky points.

LAKE HODGES
After recent fires charred the landscape around the reservoir, many anglers feared that Lake Hodges’ fishery was doomed. The media reported that the lake was hit hard and likely wouldn’t recover for years.

Giusti tells California Game & Fish that those reports aren’t true.

“Nothing happened to the bass after the fires,” he said. “There are still fish there, and they’re growing like we expected them to.”

Giusti said the water might be a little more stained, but that’s normal after a big fire. “All it did was add some sediment,” he said, “but we didn’t lose the whole fishery as people expected.”

A few years ago, Hodges suffered from several years of extremely low water levels. Fortunately, though the reservoir isn’t full, it’s high enough to harbor good populations of largemouths. And the lake fishes well during the heat of summer. Also, no water sports are permitted.

“There are good numbers of fish in there,” Giusti said.

“The fishery has come back well in recent years, but there hasn’t been much fishing pressure.”