The Lake Huites report and impressions:

It's 4 hours further south driving time than Lake Oviachic near Obregon. The cut off road around Obregon that you pick up east of Esparanza on the way to Oviachic from Rd 15 makes it nice to get around Obregon without all the stops and traffic. There are 3 additional toll booths to go to Huites, all expensive.
About a third of the road from Obregon to the El Fuerte turn off down Rd 15 has the same dbl lane construction challenges of the northern 15 road construction but the roads into El Fuerte, then Choix, then the lake are indeed all paved and pretty nice. The lodge was not fancy but nice. The food was good and the lodge owner Humberto was a very gracious host, warm and willing to accommodate needs including a run into town to get gas and rainsuits for some. Three of us got the 'ol local police shake down in various stops going down. Two in Hermosillo near the prison and another in Navajoa. I chose to play dumb and illerate and the cop finally begged me to leave him and move on.

When we arrived a 50 boat tournament had just finished up but there were no nets on the lake for us that week. The lake was down another 6-8' from having been there previously just 2 weeks earlier but launching was good and some of us left our boats in the water the whole time without much of an issue even with the rain...which started at lunch time the second day and rained steady for about 30 hours with a 10+ degree drop in air temps. The water went from 72+ to about 70. There were water falls everywhere, one far up north in the Chinnipas River area looked to be about 200-300' with a lot of water coming off the top of the mountain. All the water resulted in about a 10' raise before we left on Friday.

The fishing started off much like it was during my fly-in short trip several weeks ago with all kinds of 1.5 lb fish biting on Monday on about anything you wanted to try so we had to work at it to find areas and baits to entice bigger fish. It took awhile but after a few days an area and baits/depth were found to put some larger fish in the boat with several boats catching fish from 4-7 lbs. Not a lot but enough to keep your hopes up. The fish that were on the bank to start with kind of went deeper as the water raised.
Shallow then deeper cranks worked well as did jigs and lizards. Top water was a bit spotty, being really good in a few spots but not others and sometimes producing quality fish, but for the most part the bigger fish were caught on plastics. My boat had a 7.1, a couple of 5 1/2's, and some 4 pound fish to go with a smattering of 2.5-3 lb fish. We had about 600 fish from
1.2 - 1.7 lbs and a few smaller and they were pretty willing to bite most anything most of the time. We caught a few fish in 20' but most were in 5'
or less till the rains came and then kind of stayed in that same depth range so they got 'deeper'. Some did appear to be in spawning mode and others getting ready, some done already.

We did have some boats leave early on due to the small fish situation and head back to Oviachic but I don't know their results. I took my guys out fishing for about 2 hours on Oviachic Sat morning on our way home, up into Dry Creek and caught 5 fish between 4.12 and 6.2, a MUCH BETTER RATIO for sure than what Huites gave up so driving 4 hours further to catch smaller, albeit a lot of bass, is just not for everyone but it's kind of nice at least on occasion to have a new challenge!

Sam Sherwood
Mesa, AZ