Any one fished Elephant Butte, Navajo or Abique? Other lakes in NM? Looking to go NM this summer. Fifth wheel and 2 kayaks.
I fished Elephant Butte from the bank,
not from any kind of a boat. Its a fairly big wide open lake with few places to hide from the wind. EB is a desert lake, cover is limited to brush drowned when the lake was impounded, so its probably gone by now. My wife’s cousin used to fish it and run his 40 ft cruiser on the lake. Supposedly, its a decent bass lake.
cochiti lake
is a small lake north of albuquerque around 15 miles it has crappie,kokanee,large mouth,and other sunnies. you can double up and mtn bike around the lake also you can fish from the bank or use the two boat launches , good luck
Drowned cover
It does not disappear. It lays there and eats tackle. EB has been low but the water is supposed to be coming up this year and the striper fishery is supposed to excellent. EB is normally about 20 degrees cooler than the Lake Havasu area. It gets into the 120’s here so we travel to escape the high heat.
Going east, not west to California and
the bass lakes? I’m not a fan of desert lakes, mainly because I fish lakes that have lots of flooded timber. But, can understand when faced with the heat you get out in your part of the country. Its not the humidity, its the damn heat is what I learned when I lived in W. Texas.
Elephant Butte
I fished there many years ago while in graduate school at NMSU. I always caught a lot of nice bass and blue gill/perch/bream. I typically used an ultralight rig Mepps spinners. It was a nice lake from what I recall.
Beware the wind
I have fished Elephant Butte and Caballo when I lived in NM (I also went to graduate school at NMSU). Crappie and white bass fishing can be good at times but beware of the wind when it comes up. I was fishing one time with a small canoe with an electric trolling motor. when a wind came up and I only barely made it in to shore (I was paddling as well as running the motor at full speed). The west wind was trying to push me across the lake where I would have had to wait for it to die down before I would have been able to return to my camp and car. The lake is open with few trees or anything else to slow the wind down.