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
