It’s almost time to get serious about our 2023 Sacramento River Striped Bass fishing season coming up in April and May of 2023. Sitting here listening to the rain hit the roof and monitoring river flows makes me think about the potential for an exceptional Striper season ahead. Springtime flows from a wet winter mean turbid river water, which means a strong Striper spawning run, which means great fishing! We still have a ways to go before spring but if the wet weather patterns continue over the next 12 weeks we’re in for some Striper fishing we haven’t seen in several years.

Daves first Striper trip with us last year and he got into some great fish!

One of our favorite techniques for catching Striped bass is to power drift live minnows. Stripers love live bait and we but $1000’s of dollars worth every season to ensure our clients have plenty of opportunities to catch their Striped bass. We troll live minnows downstream with electric motors to keep fro spooking the Stripers we are targeting. Most Stripers are found along the shoreline which means trolling over them in shallow water. Keeping things quiet really helps get bites from these aggressive yet cautious fish.

Kevin holds his best Striper to date from last season when conditions were less than optimal but very productive!

When we find the Stripers schooled up it’s usually pretty easy to hook up! When we find these pods of Stripers we often time experience double, triple, even quadruple hook ups when drifting over them with live bait. We use light action rods for this technique and just enough lead to tick bottom every 10’ or so. Keeping the minnows on the bottom is important for success! The bite isn’t hard to detect and more times than not the Stripers hook themselves making hook sets unnecessary. You go from feeling the tick, tick of the weight on the bottom to feeling the full weight of a Striper peeling line off your reel. Its so much fun and the Stripers fight as hard as any fish I’ve caught anywhere else.

Double hook ups ar not uncommon while Striper fishing on the Sacramento River!

The best time to fish for Striped bass on the Sacramento River begins in early April and can go well into May during wet weather years. As long as the water temps stay in the 50’s the Stripers will hold off on their spawn which keeps them in the system longer. Once the water temps hit the mid 60’s most of the Stripers will spawn and quickly move back down river. We book the majority of our trips from the first week of April through the second week of May to ensure we have the best fishing available for the clients fishing with us. We fish until limits have been retained by our clients or until we reach the end of a 7-8 hour day. We don’t pressure our clients to retain the first few Stripers they catch so we can go home early during any of our trips unless they wish to do so.

If this looks like a trip you would be interested in and have a party of 4 anglers wanting to fish, let us know! (We don’t mix our groups so we ask for a minimum party size of 4 during Striper season). We are already taking reservations for the 2023 Striper season and contacting Jaynie at (530) 510-2925 is the first step. We’ll have a few boats fishing daily so we can accommodate around 60 trips during the 2023 season. Once those trips are sold out we won’t have any availability until the following year. We do work with other guides though and can help arrange a booking with one of them after we are sold out. We’re looking forward to this season and seeing all of our Striper clients from this past year in 2023.

Tight Lines,

Capt. Jeff Goodwin