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With the holidays upon us, most north state bass fishermen have packed it in for the year, forced to wait out the winter months until early spring. However, a growing number of bass fishermen have discovered the joys of winter striper fishing on the California Delta. Starting in mid October, striped bass begin making their way into the system. Early in the season, it's mainly smaller fish in the 14 to 24 inch class. By mid November and throughout the months of December and January, we see better quality fish averaging 5 to 15 pounds with even larger fish in the 20 and 30 pound class caught on a regular basis. December can be one of the prime months for catching big numbers of these hard fighting gamefish and it also offers anglers a good shot at catching a trophy sized fish. I made several trips to the Delta over the last few weeks and most days have produced excellent action with catches of 20 to 30 fish, most in the 3 to 12 pound class. My latest trip was on Thursday, December 2, with Jody Jordan of Vacaville. Jordan has been hitting the Delta stripers hard for the past two months and catching big numbers of fish on a variety of techniques, most of them typically used for black bass. Some of those techniques include dart heading plastic grubs and soft jerk baits, flippin' jigs and grubs into timber and throwing topwater baits such as Zara Spooks and Rico's. We met at B&W Resort around 6:45 in order to hit the water at first light. After loading up Jordan's 518 Ranger, we made a run for Mildred Island where large concentrations of shad have been attracting big numbers of striped bass for the last two months. Upon arriving, we scoped out several small bays inside the flooded island looking for signs of activity such as diving birds or surface boils. Things were pretty quiet so we decided to head to one of Jordan's favorite banks where he had caught several fish the day before. |
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Jody started off with a Zoom fluke fished on a darter head and I was throwing a shad colored Rat-L-Trap. Within a few minutes, we located a large school of bait on the Lowrance X85 and Jody was immediately hammered on the fluke. After a hardy battle, we had our first of many fish that day, a scrappy 6 pounder. On his very next cast, Jody hit another striper and that was all it took to make me switch over to a fluke. That proved to be a good move, as I managed to hook into my first fish of the day before Jody had even landed his second fish. Over the next 1/2 hour, we boated another 5 or 6 fish, most of them running 3 to 6 pounds, while drifting flukes in 8 to 10 feet of water. As we headed out towards one of the main points inside the island, I noticed several baitfish popping out of the water close to shore along the weed line. I picked up a Super Spook and bombed it down the edge of the weedline. As I worked the bait back towards the boat, a large boil erupted just below the surface, but the fish never touched the bait. Fortunately, I didn't jump the gun and kept a steady rhythm to the bait's action. A few seconds later, the fish smashed it again and the fish was on. This was another good fish, close to 8 pounds on my Cul-M-Rite scale. Three casts later I was into another topwater fish, this one hit the bait three times before it finally stuck. There is nothing more exiting than catching striped bass on topwater baits. The fish are extremely aggressive and for some reason, they tend to miss the bait much more often than a black bass. However, these fish are tenacious and they will usually stick with it until they're hooked. Eventually the topwater bite slowed down, and we found scattered action while throwing weighted flukes into schools of bait we located on the fish finder. By noon, the wind began to howl out of the west and we were forced to head in. Our total fish count for the morning was 18 fish with the largest weighing in at just over 8 pounds. As of press time, several friends have hit the same area over the past few days and reported tough fishing. "I fished on Tuesday and the same areas that were holding huge schools of bait a week earlier were absolutely dead," explained Jordan. "However, we managed to find a few schools of fish in the Franks Tract area and near the mouth of the Mokelumne River that produced some small stripers in the 2 to 4 pound class. Hopefully the warm temperatures we're having this week will put the fish back on the bite." |
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