Winter 2020
Borges explained the striper/salmon migration reverses itself for spring. “The whole process is the striper follow the salmon beginning in the fall and then the striper spawn and then, the striper follow the salmon back out in the spring,” he said. “So, you have two different runs. The fall run of them coming in and the spring run of them going out.”
W
ith 1000 miles of waterways, the California
Delta becomes a vast fishery to target striped
bass. Vince Borges of Vince Borges Outdoors sheds a little light on the stripes within the Delta System.
“When I talk about the Delta, I consider everything east
of Sherman Lake and everything that is west of that I call the
West Delta,” began Borges. “The West Delta has the more
brackish, outgoing water than the Delta system itself.”
The fall striper run kicked off a few months ago. By the
time of this publication, Borges expects them to be showing
up all the way into the south Delta.
FALL AND SPRING MIGRATION
“In the fall, the stripers move with the salmon,” he explained. “If you follow their pattern, they come in all the way from the Bay into the West Delta (Sherman, Eddo’s, Rio Vista). Then, they trickle into the main Delta system. As the water temperatures drop, larger volumes of fish and also bigger ones move in. The fall run goes into the winter.”
TARGET TEMP
Borges looks for water temps to hit the low 60’s before he expects to see the striper bite in an area.
“Once it starts to get down to the low to mid 50’s, that’s when we hit the prime temperature range,” he said. “Then, when it gets around 49 to 50-degrees, the bite becomes a little bit tougher. There isn’t a specific month for those temps. You just never know with our California weather. It depends on how warm or how long the fall is and how cold, wet or long our winter is.”
THE SPAWN
January to March is the time of year that Borges reported the striper spawn would be most likely.
“After that, they move back out into the Delta system, toward the ocean,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of the party boats in the Bay, start running their potluck trips with halibut and striper around April.
“That’s typically the time of year that the striper are starting to push back in the Bay pretty strong and the latter part of that movement is when you start catching those schoolie stripers, because they are grouping up. That is when
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