Sunny skies, little to no wind, 70 degree weather and winter water temperatures that had been steadily rising for the past three weeks from the low 40’s up into the 50’s – the perfect day to take a colleague of mine out for his first fly fishing trip on the Delta. Kelvin is no stranger to Delta stripers by any means but “tossing” flies to them is a new concept he’d just recently taken an interest in… (compliments of TheAngle of course).
While Kelvin was re-tuning his casting stroke for his first experience launching T-14 I took advantage of the early morning’s low-light and flat water to continue my top-water efforts testing some new surface experimentations I’d tied up over the past week.

The crease fly and Lee’s gurgler were included in the picture for perspective.

Maybe 20 minutes into it and 4 fly changes later I was rewarded with a big boil behind my fly immediately followed by a turbulent strike and a miss. A few minutes later and Kelvin’s fly was grabbed and prematurely released. As the sun continued rising it was looking like it was going to be a great day. WRONG! The rest of the day went basically fishless. The spring-like weather made up for the slow fishing though and after washing a midday burger down with a cold sierra on the deck of Sugar Barge’s Paradise Grill we mutually agreed that we had been stuck working off some unpaid dues… and that Jeff is going to owe us one.

We lazily stuck it out through the late afternoon until the sun began setting behind Mt Diablo at which time I switched back to my top-water setup and began pounding out surface presentations again. “Plop” — “plop” — “plop” — pause… “plop” — pause.. BOIL – “plop” – “plop” – “plop” – “plop” – pause… BANG ! “Fish-on”! 2 seconds later, “Fish-off”! Oh well, “That was Awesome”! With the sun down and the last remaining light quickly following, we worked a tule line into the darkness with a few more boils and one more grab-n-miss before we finally dug out the lights and began the long dark boat ride back to the marina.