The Assignment:
Find some midday to late afternoon Napa River Stripers before the top of a very high incoming tide
Looking for midday, early afternoon fish because I have a bunch of full-day charters coming up. I know the peak times but I have to find at least some action for my customers throughout the whole day. It’s the nature of the business.
Yesterday: A couple of fish here and there and then ‘one last spot’ at the end of the day… right?
Now it’s so late it’s obvious that I’m … just out here for me.
Having said that, these late afternoon – early evening solo sojourns teach you a lot. It makes you think, it helps you understand fish movement at high tide, low tide and slack tide. Whether it’s coming in or going out you have to find where the fish are at.
I’ve got this spot pretty well figured out at two specific times and conditions: a) on the incoming from the bottom of the low at sunrise and 2) part of the way through the outgo at sunset. And from that I deduce where they go towards the middle to the top of the incoming tide when exposed mudflats are now covered with 5’-6’-7’ of water. What I found out is that they move around quickly and they move a lot.
At sunset when there is no one else is around and it’s deadly quiet you can hear the melancholy sound of the birds as they settle in for the night OR distant howls of coyotes AND … you will quite often hear the sound of Stripers tail slapping and crashing bait.
And yesterday they were a 1/4 of a mile back from the entrance, in shallow water – swirling and tail slapping, pinning bait against some little tule islands in the middle of nowhere.
It’s typically a low light occurrence here (and it continues most definitely through the darkest hours of the night) but I have also seen it a couple of times during the middle of the day.
But that’s at this particular spot. Each of them have their own unique, structures, features, tidal influences and way they function at different times.
Capt Aussie Bob
Wombat Charters
Napa, California