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View Full Version : Wading the sandbar at the mouth of the Feather River



Bill Kiene semi-retired
05-11-2007, 09:24 AM
We started fishing there for Stripers and Shad when I worked at West Capitol Rod & Gun in West Sac around 1970.

Joe Shirshac, Bill King, Harry Boley, Ronny Knop, Frank Pullen, Galen Geller, Mel Jeffs, Cecil Wilder, Walt Bennett, Neil Hansen.......hell, all the fly guys I knew went there back then.

We caught Stripers and Shad wading there but we had to be very careful to not walk off the downstream end of the sandbar which puts you out in the middle of the Sacramento River and in trouble.

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I just talked to old Joe Shirshac on the cell phone and he and Charlie Gonzales are in Charlies boat there right now. Joe said he just had a Striper on and lost it this morning. Early they were busting the surface and Charlie had one chasing his popper to no avail.

Joe went there yesterday morning and landed two Stripers while wading the sandbar.

You park ($5.00/car) in the private marina right at the mouth of the Feather River and walk about 100 yards upstream and then wade out to the sand bar.

You can catch Stripers and Shad there wading now for about a month as long as the Feather and the Sacramento flows stay down.

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This is were Don Rotsma and I hit them big time wading on night back then. We landed too many to count from 10 to 20 pounds. Just the two of us. Don got cleaned out buy a really big one too. Larry Cullens was out there in the dark in his pram really whacking them.

Geller would go up there by himself and fish all night long. Maybe he will tell some of his stories?

Ron Hayashi caught his over 40 pound world record Striper there too.

Professor Bill King caught a 30 pound plus fish there while wading back then. He drove you to the front door of my old fly shop with it in the trunk(front) of his VW bug.Quit a sight.

A group of old fly fishers from Lodi where wading for Shad back in the 1970s and a big school of Stripers showed up. they landed something like 26 Stripers mostly on Shad flies.

Cecil (Jr) Wilder and I would take a portable Coleman stove out with us so we could cook up Shad roe right on the bar "back in the day." We would smoke the rest of the fish.

Not too many years back (~5?) Marilyn and I took our portable barbeque out there with some friends to Shad fish and cook up some "hot dogs".

Anne Vitale
05-14-2007, 10:06 PM
I had to attend a seminar this morning in Sacramento. To make it more tolerable, I went up to Verona yesterday, camped overnight and wade fished for shad. I found the river so low that I did much of my fishing standing in a place I once fished from an anchored boat with Lee s. a couple of years back. I don't know how far across the river you can wade safely but it is close to all the way. I could see that there were some deep holes scattered here and there that you had to wade around so I didn't try it. I did, however, see a young kid make it about 9/10 of the way and barely got his shorts wet. He was the only one I saw catch a few shad and that wasn't until about 8:00 pm.

Actually I wasn't expecting much. As I was gearing up, I overheard someone who said he was a guide, complaining about the shad having moved on upstream to Shanghai Bend. Perhaps he was right. I just know they weren't spending that afternoon and evening in Verona.

The sand bar extends laterally across the river. With the exception of the first 20 feet or so where the river is about a foot deep, the first 200 feet of the sand bar sits about a foot above the river level, forming a small island while the rest of it is about a foot or two under water. However, the river is fishable by standing on the sandbar and fishing downstream into the deep holes that form immediately downstream of the sandbar. In the four hours I fished it, I didn't get a single shad but I did manage about 6 schoolies to about 18 inches on a small chart/white Clouser minnow.

Before heading home to Marin, I stopped by the fly shop to pick up some fly tying stuff and got to spend some time chatting with Bill. All in all a nice trip........Anne

Tony Buzolich
05-15-2007, 07:16 AM
We were on the river last night at Shanghai and like most places things just kept getting better the later it got. Around 8:00PM the shad were on the surface and anything stripped across the top would be taken.

There were three of us in the boat fishing and double hookups were a regular thing with several triple hookups as well.

The highlite of the trip came when when Bob Bradbury was landing another shad and a big striper came and ate his catch. Just about pulling the rod from his hand all he could do was hang on until his leader broke :P " Yahoo, let's do that again with a bigger hook".

We stayed until about 8:30PM as without an early moon it was getting hard to see. Watch out for the snags in the river. There are lots of them and it's barely a foot deep in some places.

TONY