CALIFORNIA 



San Pablo Bay is usually good during that period. The fishing 

 in Suisun Bay and the deltas of the San Joaquin and Sacra- 

 mento rivers is extremely popular and it starts getting good 

 in August and endures into early November. 



From January until May the fish average between lo and 

 15 pounds with an occasional 20- to 30-pounder. After May, 

 larger fish are more likely to be caught. In 1926 a bass was 

 taken on rod and reel in the Russian River in Sonoma County 

 that weighed 72 pounds— within a pound of the world record 

 —and in 19 15 a fish weighing SjYi pounds was caught in a 

 net in Suisun Bay near the mouth of the Sacramento. This 

 was one of the largest striped bass Heilner and I have ever 

 heard of. What a pity that so many of our great game fish 

 have to be caught by commercial or unorthodox methods! 

 In 1945 a man who had just arrived in the United States from 

 Sweden took a 6 5 -pound striper in Long Island Sound, New 

 York, trolling from a rowboat with a hand line! He had never 

 done any rod-and-reel fishing. This is the largest bass in some 

 years to be recorded in the East as being caught by other than 

 straight commercial methods. 



The distribution of the striped bass on the West Coast is 

 from the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon to Mon- 

 terey Bay in California. For some unknown reason the fish 

 skip the coast of northern California and southern Oregon. 



Heilner has told me that one of the biggest thrills he ever 

 experienced in his long and interesting fishing career was 

 when he participated in the Striped Bass Derby at Rio Vista 

 on the Sacramento River. In 1935 there were nine thousand 

 entries and a year later fifteen thousand. All out for a one-day 

 fishing contest. A bomb was detonated as a starting signal 



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