A good season to go fishing

The cooler weather and longer nights of early fall have worked their annual magic on local waters, brightening the prospects for all anglers who venture forth on our bays and ocean.

The best fishing close to Sonoma is in San Francisco Bay where the striped bass are so thick you can almost walk across the water on their backs, although I wouldn’t recommend trying.

All the young stripers have headed into the big bay from their incubator sloughs in the Central Valley and our own Napa-Sonoma Delta areas where they will feed and grow big for years to come. In the meantime, if you fish in the bay this fall you will catch lots of them in the 14-to-16-inch range. A few, about one in five or six, will be over the 18-inch legal size limit. But, you’ll have lots of action catching and releasing in any case.

Keith Fraser at Loch Lomond Bait Shop in San Rafael says the bigger fish are being caught by anglers drifting live shiners, while lots of small bass are being caught trolling along the Marin Shoreline at the top of tide.  

Some halibut and a few salmon are also being caught now.

Keith books party boats for bay fishing and it is a great way to spend a day on beautiful water with great scenery and lots of action. Call Keith at 415-456-0321 for the latest conditions and to book a party boat.

If you just want to fish for striped bass off the bank, try the Napa River near Cuttings Wharf, Moore’s Landing area.

Rock and lingcod continue to bite aggressively off the Sonoma Coast this week. Capt. Rick Powers of Bodega Bay Sportsfishing is still finding lots of fish for his clients. He is also gearing up for the dungeness crab season, which opened Oct. 1.

Cooler nights have also improved the fishing at Clear Lake where top-water lures are working at the north end and orange and brown jigs are working at the southern end.

Smallmouth and spotted bass are biting in the coves and narrow channels at Lake Berryessa, and trout are being planted in Lake Amador this month.

Kevin Jaggie and his son Nolan, 14, and Steve Kyle and his granddaughter, Charlotte, who is a sophomore at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, fished for steelhead last week on the Rogue River with guide Jim Andras.

Nolan caught a nice steelhead on his last cast of the day.