No Lip Fish

I caught this fish on the Delta on 6-5-11, the sound quality is pretty bad because of the wind...but check this fish out he was just under 4 and his top lip was cut sheer off - I mean down to the bone clean strait line.  As you can see there is a Marina in the background and my only thought is this guy was suspended under a boat when the captain decided to start it!    Pretty funny video as I thought Mark was taking a picture and it turned out to be a video.  Fishing report from this day will be out in about a week so check back to http://fishingasarookie.blogspot.com/ on 6-18-11

California Delta - Low Tide Fishing part 1

I am definatly no guru on the California Delta and im learning each and every trip out there, the Low Tide can be a mystery for many fisherman who fish tidal waters. Just hours ago you were flipping into the Tulles up on the bank and wackin fish, now comes the dread low tide and those tulles have inches of water on them leaving one to scratch thier head..."where did all my fish go?" I still find myself asking this question but what really helped me advance was donning a new lense to look through - and I wanted to share it, cause it just may work for you too.

The Lense I use for looking at Low Tide situations is to look at the grass lines the same way I  look at a topo map - what i mean by that is if you flatten out the grass and dont look at it as grass - just look at the structure aspect and topography.

 Fig 1   John Crews Fishing The Delta on Low Tide                                                         Fig 2  Topo Map     

   Compare the above two pictures look down at the grass you will begin to see points, dropoffs, edges and ledges - you will see structure in terms of rocks and tulles, stickups, and ditches - once you start recognizing the vegetation (and you dont need to know it by name) you will notice changes in vegetation - i treat these like i do rock transitions on lakes - the interesting thing about the vegetation and starting to learn it is that you will see that certain vegetation likes certain bottom composition - like hippie grass likes sandier areas.

The other thing to do is to pull the boat off the bank and not just the bank the flat that you are on as well so that your boat is in 10-14' and look from there Fig1(see how crews is well outside the grass line) - low tide is more of a mental hurdel then anything else. I dont have it all figured out but when i started looking at it through the eyes of topography it started to make more sense for me.  It was no longer a bunch of grass clumps, they started to take familiar shapes and forms that I could easily interpret - main lake points, secondary points, humps, creek channels all on a macro level!

I highly encourage anyone who is "stuck" when fishing low tide to plan your fishing days for the majority of the day to be on the low tide look around and embrace it - you will start to see a whole different fishery and by learning the low tide you will greatly improve your fishing skills on the high tide. 

A great guide and a good friend Andy "Cooch" Cuccia has an excellent article on Solving the Delta Low Tides

Delta Bound - June 4th

I am Delta Bound this weekend June 4th - i can feel the electricity in the air as I am getting geared up to go out and scout out some fish for the Upcoming WRL tournament on June 18th, but I think the electricity in the air is literally from the thunderstorms that are passing through the region. 

I think this year the lesson that the fishing gods are trying to teach me is to fish in the moment - each and every cast is a new moment - cause that is the weather I have been in ALL EFFIN YEAR! So prefish for the Delta is going to be Rain Showers throughout the day and winds SSE with a barometric Press at 29 and dropping, temp is looking to be around 63 with a low in the 50's tide is 3+ high at 7:am and -.5at 14:30 lots of water coming through the system and it be cold water - Of course our tournament in two weeks will be in the 80's no breeze and same tide - well at least the tide will be the same!