The main body of the lake itself is relatively small, but two good fishing areas stand out for largemouths, especially in the spring. Both of these areas offer large shallow-water areas with standing timber. The rule of thumb on Oroville is that if you're searching for largemouths, look for flooded timber, but if you're after spotted bass, stay close to the rocks. A number of fishing techniques are used for spotted bass on Oroville, but the favorite is known as shaking a plastic worm. Instead of crawling along the bottom, the shaking action makes the worm appear much more erratic and keeps it slightly above the bottom.
Some fishermen add small glass beads to their worm rigs to increase the noise the worm makes.
Not surprisingly, the favorite plastic worms for Lake Oroville are those that are hand poured rather than injection molded. Although both techniques produce lures of nearly identical shapes and sizes, anglers firmly believe hand-poured plastic worms are more realistic looking to the bass because of their colors. While a lot of largemouth bass are taken here on plastic worms, two other favorite year-round techniques are spinnerbaiting around the flooded timber and fishing jerkbaits along sloping banks. Most spinnerbaiting is with the technique of slow-rolling, in which the lure is reeled slower so it stays deeper. Some skilled anglers will actually work their lures down to 20 feet through the flooded timber.