On the fish at Clear Lake April 2010!

So I planned to take a few days off and get in some Spring fishing. Spring can be the best time to go fishing. The water warms up a little, the fish get more active and start to eat more. Plus after a long winter of cold weather just a little time in the sun feels good.

But of course it can also be a time of wind and rain and you can have some of the toughest conditions to catch fish.

I booked a day with a guide friend of mine Bob Myskey of www.FishClearLake.com. Bob spends about 200 days a year on the lake in all kinds of conditions and I always learn something and always catch fish when I go with him. When I first called in early April he said "I'm booked for the entire month." Yikes! The big bass tournament that is shown on ESPN had once again made Clear Lake look good on national tv, and add that to Bob's "regulars" and I was outta luck. But my phone rang and he called me back saying he got a cancellation and I was able to get a day.

I easily talked my buddy Jesse into coming up from Tracy where he lives and fishes the south Delta. Jesse has been fishing a long time and competes in tournaments, and has won a few boats in his time. He can really fish and is really competitive.

My plan was to head up on a Friday after work, fish a few days, then Jesse would come up Monday and we would fish with Bob Tuesday and go out on my boat Wednesday. Well Saturday and Sunday a big storm came blowing in. It brought wind and lots of rain. Ack! I wasn't going out on the water in that, and I was only thankful that it didn't last much into Monday.

The forecast Tuesday was for a chance of showers, but partly cloudy and not much wind. As we we met Bob at Lakeport's public ramp we knew the bite would be tough the day after the storm. Bob asked if we wanted to use live bait, minnows, the best bet for these conditions, but we passed and felt that we could test our skills using artificials for some catch and release bass fishing.

Because Bob and Jesse fish at pretty high tournament levels, I've never done it, they chatted about various lakes, strategies, and tournaments. It was cool to overhear all the fish talk. It really made me want to give a competition a try. Bob slowly motored around and showed us where the winner of the ESPN tournament spent all his time. He showed us a few docks and walls where he likes to fish, and talked about how tough the bite had been with the storms. Unbelievably he had gone out in all that weather over the weekend. His boat got soaked, but using minnows a father and son were able to catch fish.

Now that is a guide working for his money!

Ok our turn. With all the rain that hit California this year Clear Lake was at the "full mark" and a little over. So the lake had spilled back into tules and trees that held 4 to 5 feet of water that hadn't had any for a long time. The bass love cover so we spent the day combat fishing in all of that. We went into cover, right next to trees, and into the mouth of creeks that have sand and gravel bars that usually wouldn't let you get back in these places.

Bob lives on Clear Lake and in low water years he has shot photos of the shoreline and the structure that is exposed at low water. That really helps now when the water is high. You can be in his boat and he will tell you about a big flat that runs from the mouth of this creek then drops off fast, or a point that extends out towards the deep water that you can fish. It is pretty amazing to hear him go on like that. It is tremendous knowledge to have and we used it as we fished creeks, flats and tules that in most years were too shallow to get at.

We ended up using Bob's "power drop shot" method deep in the cover. About half way into the day a fellow guide pulled up and said he had has 6 fish so far with minnows, we had 8 with the rigs Bob had us use. The day of combat fishing way back in the cover with his power drop shot method ended up with about 10 fish, I lost 2 and of course Jesse out fished me big time. Our best 5 ran into the upper teens, maybe 17 or 18 pounds. It was a great day on the water and even in pretty tough conditions we caught fish and got them all in places that most people would either wouldn't know about or wouldn't dare take their boats.



The weather held off until we had just hit the dock and Bob showed us some trick knots and rigs to use as Jesse was headed to a tournament the next weekend at Lake Shasta, and I was headed home to think about when I can get out on the water again.

More Bad News: Counting The Fish (tell Will Durst!)

"Watching fisheries that God nurtured over tens of thousands of years being virtually destroyed in less than two decades while DWR, the Bureau and the State Board continue their embrace of denial is surely one of the most wretched and despicable spectacles we have ever witnessed."

Bill Jennings

When I hear Will Durst doing those ads for the unions that want to build the dams and the peripheral canal I cringe. Will is a paid voice for those ads. I'm not sure if he understands all of the issues with what he is talking about.

He ought to talk to my buddy Dan.

Here's numbers from an article from outdoor writer Dan Bacher one of the best and most hard assed outdoor writers around. He's a bulldog.

Not so much a "10 best places to camp to watch a full moon" type guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that you understand. In fact I'd love a few tips for some full moon camping in 09!

But I digress.

Read more at the link above that will take you to a page from the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. Also look to Water 4 Fish for some good information.

I pulled out the numbers of the fish counts in the Delta that Dan used. Please refer to his complete article for more. When you hear "old timers" talk about the good old days of catching giant fish all day long in the Delta, you know they aren't all lying. Since then lots and lots of water is pumped out of the Delta and heads south. When those pumps run fish die. That's a simple and easy to understand fact.

American Shad
2008: 271 (record low)
2007: 533
2003: 9360

Threadfin Shad
2008: 450
2007: 3177

Sacramento Splittail
2008: ZERO
2007: 1

Striped Bass
2008: 220
2007: 82
1971: 9500

Longfin Smelt
2008: 113
2007: 13
1998: 6654

The cause? Well many things, but how about keep it simple stupid. Remove water, fish die. Add water to the delta, where it will flush out pollution and allows the system to naturally clean itself, and fish live.

And what's up with that in the last few years? Come on take a wild guess?

Did someone say record water exports?! Ohh you there you're a winner! Here's some more numbers.

Dan writes:

State and federal fishery biologists have pinpointed three major causes of the fishery decline - increased water exports, toxics and invasive species. More recently, increases in ammonia releases through sewage treatment plants have been cited by scientists as a possible factor.


Record water export levels occurred in:
2003 (6.3 million acre feet)
2004 (6.1 MAF)
2005 (6.5 MAF)
and 2006 (6.3 MAF)

Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent.

So now what?

Well lots of people are working to keep the fish alive.

Understand this isn't a bunch of fishermen crying like little babies about a few bad fishing days. These outdoors men and women see it first hand. They know the rivers and Delta in California are barely able to sustain any life at all. It isn't maybe going to, or might happen in the future, this is now.

The Delta is a deadzone for fish. In a crazy effort to try to keep the salmon population alive even the hatchery raised salmon can't be put into the Sacramento river and be allowed to naturally swim south to the bay. There isn't any food for them there.

They get trucked from up north and put into pens in the bay to feed. When they are big enough they are then released. If they tried to make it all they way down the Sacramento they would starve to death.

Dan ends his editorial like this.

The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by changing the agency's name - or taking more water out of the Delta through the peripheral canal proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Department of Water Resources, Senator Diane Feinstein and the Nature Conservancy as a "solution" to the Delta's problems.

The canal and more dams that Schwarzenegger and Mike Chrisman, Resources Secretary, are campaigning for will only exacerbate the imperiled status of these fish populations, driving them over the precipice of extinction.

The only way the Resources Agency can live up to its new "natural" name is to abandon the mad campaign for a peripheral canal and more dams, mandate water conservation by corporate agribusiness, adopt tough agricultural water pollution standards and require the retirement of toxic selenium-filled soil in the Westlands Water District.

Makes sense to me.

Help out and get info here.

Send friends this blog posting if you want to by using the email link at the very top next to the title of the post.

Thanks.

More Bad News: Counting The Fish (tell Will Durst!)

"Watching fisheries that God nurtured over tens of thousands of years being virtually destroyed in less than two decades while DWR, the Bureau and the State Board continue their embrace of denial is surely one of the most wretched and despicable spectacles we have ever witnessed."

Bill Jennings

When I hear Will Durst doing those ads for the unions that want to build the dams and the peripheral canal I cringe. Will is a paid voice for those ads. I'm not sure if he understands all of the issues with what he is talking about.

He ought to talk to my buddy Dan.

Here's numbers from an article from outdoor writer Dan Bacher one of the best and most hard assed outdoor writers around. He's a bulldog.

Not so much a "10 best places to camp to watch a full moon" type guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that you understand. In fact I'd love a few tips for some full moon camping in 09!

But I digress.

Read more at the link above that will take you to a page from the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. Also look to Water 4 Fish for some good information.

I pulled out the numbers of the fish counts in the Delta that Dan used. Please refer to his complete article for more. When you hear "old timers" talk about the good old days of catching giant fish all day long in the Delta, you know they aren't all lying. Since then lots and lots of water is pumped out of the Delta and heads south. When those pumps run fish die. That's a simple and easy to understand fact.

American Shad
2008: 271 (record low)
2007: 533
2003: 9360

Threadfin Shad
2008: 450
2007: 3177

Sacramento Splittail
2008: ZERO
2007: 1

Striped Bass
2008: 220
2007: 82
1971: 9500

Longfin Smelt
2008: 113
2007: 13
1998: 6654

The cause? Well many things, but how about keep it simple stupid. Remove water, fish die. Add water to the delta, where it will flush out pollution and allows the system to naturally clean itself, and fish live.

And what's up with that in the last few years? Come on take a wild guess?

Did someone say record water exports?! Ohh you there you're a winner! Here's some more numbers.

Dan writes:

State and federal fishery biologists have pinpointed three major causes of the fishery decline - increased water exports, toxics and invasive species. More recently, increases in ammonia releases through sewage treatment plants have been cited by scientists as a possible factor.


Record water export levels occurred in:
2003 (6.3 million acre feet)
2004 (6.1 MAF)
2005 (6.5 MAF)
and 2006 (6.3 MAF)

Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent.

So now what?

Well lots of people are working to keep the fish alive.

Understand this isn't a bunch of fishermen crying like little babies about a few bad fishing days. These outdoors men and women see it first hand. They know the rivers and Delta in California are barely able to sustain any life at all. It isn't maybe going to, or might happen in the future, this is now.

The Delta is a deadzone for fish. In a crazy effort to try to keep the salmon population alive even the hatchery raised salmon can't be put into the Sacramento river and be allowed to naturally swim south to the bay. There isn't any food for them there.

They get trucked from up north and put into pens in the bay to feed. When they are big enough they are then released. If they tried to make it all they way down the Sacramento they would starve to death.

Dan ends his editorial like this.

The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by changing the agency's name - or taking more water out of the Delta through the peripheral canal proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Department of Water Resources, Senator Diane Feinstein and the Nature Conservancy as a "solution" to the Delta's problems.

The canal and more dams that Schwarzenegger and Mike Chrisman, Resources Secretary, are campaigning for will only exacerbate the imperiled status of these fish populations, driving them over the precipice of extinction.

The only way the Resources Agency can live up to its new "natural" name is to abandon the mad campaign for a peripheral canal and more dams, mandate water conservation by corporate agribusiness, adopt tough agricultural water pollution standards and require the retirement of toxic selenium-filled soil in the Westlands Water District.

Makes sense to me.

Help out and get info here.

Send friends this blog posting if you want to by using the email link at the very top next to the title of the post.

Thanks.

Va-cay Spring '06: wind, rain, wind

Eh, so much for big long days on the water for my vacation at record setting Clear Lake.

Lots of wind from Tuesday to Friday, then rain. I went out Monday and Tuesday with my friend Jessie. Had fun but the weather picked up and I took the boat out and fished from shore the rest of the week. Did ok on the drop shot rig from shore, and got this one on the south end of the lake Tuesday morning.



Took a trip to Boggs Demo Forest on Cobb Mountain. Very cool place, and GREAT mountain bike trails (video). They race there, and you can camp free, and hike or go for a ride.

Had a nice lunch after the hike at the Cobb Deli. It has a deck overlooking Kelsey Creek.



Friday was the best day. Indeed it 'twas a beauty!



The heron on the lake are always fishing. Hey you gotta keep up the reputation and be ready for the big Heron festival




Had a good meal with some nice local Steele wine at the Blue Wing Saloon in the Tallman Hotel in Upper Lake.

So big fish every day? No, not with the cold fronts and rain all week. (Wouldn't you know awesome Spring weather is headed to Nor. Cal. the week after I get back!)

But once again Lake County didn't let me down. 2007 Spring vacation goes in the books as 8 on a 10 scale. A beautiful place, and I didn't have to go to an airport! Yea!

Day on the Bay

I went out with my friend Peter, he lives in Berkeley with his wife and 2 young girls. We went for sturgeon and anchored off the Oakland Airport. No Sturgy, but we caught a bat ray and this croaker or kingfish. Had fun, and it was a little windy, but not too bad.






He told me this great story about his kid.

One of his kids goes to kindergarten in Berkeley. They were playing a game where one kid makes a face and the first kid to laugh is out. So the first kid pulls his eyes up and back and says "look I'm Chinese." Kids laugh of course. But the teacher says well maybe you shouldn't make that kind of face. He asks a Chinese girl in the class what does she think. She says well he shouldn't make the face because some kids might get mad. The teacher says that's right and why would they be mad?

Kid says "they'd be jealous because they aren't Chinese."

Great line!

It was about a perfect day to sail in the Oakland Estuary, good wind and lots of sun. The Oakland Yacht Club had a Sunday Brunch race, all seemed to have fun.








click on the pictures for a bigger version