59 Years Ago - Lake Washington & the Deep Water Channel

Growing up in the Sacramento area my dad and I had lots of places to fish and hunt. Lake Washington back then was a real lake fed and drained by a couple sloughs and ditches. I think Lisbon was one of them.

I remember them digging the Deep Water Channel and developing the Port of Sacramento in West Sacramento. They had installed locks then too which joined the Sacramento River and were actually used then. Lake Washington was dug out then to accommodate the large freighters that would be traveling up and down the channel from the bay and the delta. Fishing back then was mostly with bait for catfish, carp, and occasionally a striped bass if you were lucky.

On my 14th birthday my dad took me over to Sears on Arden Way and bought me a really nice spinning rod with a D.A.M.Quick reel big enough to fish with in the ocean or the delta. The next weekend I couldn't wait to try it out and we headed for the deep water channel.

A few miles down from Lake Washington there was an inlet to the channel where we could drive the old DeSoto right down to the water's edge. Dad would help me bait my hook first and then his, then we'd set out a couple of folding chairs, cast, and wait.

Cast, wait, change baits, and wait some more. Repeat again, and again. But nothing was happening. Before long I start getting bored and needed something to do besides wait. I shuffled down closer to the water and grabbed a piece of driftwood and began to whittle with my pocket knife. My dad, sitting a couple of yards away, says to watch my pole and be ready if I get a bite.

I keep whittling and sure enough my rod gets bent over big time. My dad yells for me again to grab my rod before it gets pulled into the water. He wasn't going to pick the rod up as this was MY new rod and he wanted me to land whatever had grabbed my bait.

Geez, this was great. The fish pulled harder than anything I'd ever caught before. Before long I was getting the fish closer to shore and we could see it was a big striper. After a lot of coaching Dad got the gaff out and slide down the bank and grabbed the fish. (gaffs were legal then)

Yahoo! My biggest fish ever, close to 20 lbs., on my new rod, on my birthday weekend. That was 59 years ago, in October.

Maybe this will help if you guys are looking for a time go to Lake Washington.
Tony

Great story , Tony !! Love it !!

I was in the turning basin in the tube one day , and I could see a huge Freighter way down the channel . Also saw some Birds working close to the wharf in the opposite direction , so I kicked over to them and started working the water ....

After a while , I almost jumped out of the tube as the ship's horn started blasting . I'd quit watching the freighter , and the 2 Tugs moving it up to the docks had covered my 'safe distance' - friggin' thing was maybe 100 yards away and coming RIGHT at me ! That put some 'motivation' into me , and I kicked for Lake Washington like my Life depended on it .... 'cause my Life DID depend on it .

Scary .

Around the early 1970s I worked for Harry Boley at West Capitol Rod & Gun on West Capitol Avenue near the river.

The mouth of the American river and the Port of Sacramento were very close popular fishing spots back then.

I remember them building the Port of Sacramento and the locks to go between the Sacramento river and the Port of Sacramento.

I went through the locks once in a boat.....but after some time they gave up on operating them and now they are "locked".


**One of our local Striper Commandos said that Jan/Feb were supposed to be good at the Port of Sacramento for Stripers.

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I love that story, Tony. Thanks for posting it. Great stuff. You have been chasing the striper for 60 years. I chased some today in the rain. A little windy but I got it to work.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by David Lee

Great story , Tony !! Love it !!

I was in the turning basin in the tube one day , and I could see a huge Freighter way down the channel . Also saw some Birds working close to the wharf in the opposite direction , so I kicked over to them and started working the water ....

After a while , I almost jumped out of the tube as the ship's horn started blasting . I'd quit watching the freighter , and the 2 Tugs moving it up to the docks had covered my 'safe distance' - friggin' thing was maybe 100 yards away and coming RIGHT at me ! That put some 'motivation' into me , and I kicked for Lake Washington like my Life depended on it .... 'cause my Life DID depend on it .

Scary .

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I LOVE that shit... I mean, it's just super cool hearing stories about the good ole' days. What a special experience in so many ways... there with dad, your birthday, the new rod, dad letting you 'Christen' it all by yourself and the 20# icing on the striped cake.

Thanks for that little porthole to the past.

My first experience with striper was at Shinn pond in Fremont, CA. I had been fishing all of the old Rhodes and Jameson gravel quarries since our family moved from Oakland to Fremont in 1972.

My friends and I could catch 100 bluegill in half a day at one pond, and a few dozen crappie on mini jigs at the pond down from the Thornton Ave Bridge over Alameda Creek.

When we got a little older and a bit more experienced, we would take longer excursions and go further up-creek to Buntings Pond and fish the sticks for largemouth bass. We also learned to catch monster carp on dough-balls in the pond by the RR tracks and catfish in the ponds along Paseo Padre Pkwy.

Each pond had its own, unique ecosystem which favored certain species of fish over the others...

I think it was the year of our independence day's 100 year celebration that my friend John Scholz and I gathered up the courage (and the audacity...) to sneak into the pond at Isherwood (now, a pay-to-play stocked pond, called Quarry Lakes). We had heard there were bigger bass there than in Buntings Lake so we grabbed some Creme Lure CO. black, plastic worms and gear to fix up Carolina rigs on our new Daiwa baitcasters...

That afternoon into evening, we put 17 largemouth bass on the bank and the smallest was 6lbs and the biggest was 12lbs. We didn't dare kill any because we had discovered the holy grail in our backyard and we didn't want a soul (or the East Bay Regional Park District 'rangers') to find out about it.

I think it was 1978 while fishing for black bass at Shinn pond that we saw some guys come down in the evening and bait up with live bluegills on a makeshift pier. We were just kids and they were older, gruff guys drinkin' and cussin' and we figured it best to keep to ourselves.

As the sun went down, we watched from a bluff and saw they had green glow-sticks on the ends of their rods. One of the lights moved, slowly at first and then deep and fast and violently. "THERE THAT BASTARD IS, HAHAHHAHA" the one guy said as he grabbed his rod off the rail and yanked on it hard. He fought that thing for what seemed like an eternity and then when he landed it and I could tell it was a fish I had never seen or touched before.

DAMN! It was a STRIPED BASS!

I was hooked before I even ever fished for 'em.

But fish for them I did and I never told a soul about those stripers that seemed to come out of nowhere and were only found in that one special pond.

I imagine they swam from the Dumbarton Flats up the Alameda Creek and slipped through a feed pipe into the small pond. There must have been just the right water temperature and ph and enough wind to blow their eggs around on the surface film for the 3 days it takes a striper to eye out because there were too many of them in that lake for there not to be 'in-house' re-production...

Today, I think they are no more and sadly, when Quarry Lakes was constructed, they blew the dirt walls down which before had separated many of the ponds giving them their unique character. It is all one, big muddy, commercialized enterprise now where you can fish powerbait for sickly, stocked trout in the winter and channel cats in the summer :(

On a positive note... Jeff Miller and the Alameda Creek Alliance are working with government and private sector agencies to restore the native salmon and steelhead runs on Alameda Creek.

https://www.facebook.com/AlamedaCreekAlliance/

I hope this isn't a 'hijack' Tony... it was certainly not meant to be... It's just that you inspired me to look back at my fishing past. SO THANKS for that :)

Wonderful stories Steelie...thanks.



I guess those great experiences as youngsters has kept us all chasing fish........somehow, somewhere?



When ever I drive by some new water I imagine and wonder, what fish might be in there?

Good stuff! When I was college student at San Jose State back in the late 70's, our fisheries professor arranged to have striped bass planted in Cottonwood Lake (Hellyer County Park). At one time, DFG raised stripers at a facility in Elk Grove. The lake had a large population of stunted bluegill, largemouth bass and other sunfish species. My professor wanted to introduce an aggressive, apex predator and study how it affected the size and quality of the prey species. It was a multi year reservoir management exercise where we learned field measuring and population estimating techniques. Year one (prior to the striper stocking), we seined, measured and estimated overall population. The second year was my senior year and we repeated the process and noted that the striped bass had grown from fingerling size up to 16 inches. I'm not sure what happened in subsequent years as I didn't keep track. Suffice to say, stripers did very well under these conditions. It makes me wonder if this planting program occurred in other small lakes in the Bay Area.