The California Delta is what happens when two large rivers arrive at the same place at the same time and nobody tells them where to go. The Sacramento and the San Joaquin come down out of the valley and spread into something like a thousand miles of sloughs, cuts, levees, and dead ends, all of it tidal, all of it the color of strong tea, and most of it looking exactly like the piece of water you just left. People have gotten lost in there with a chart plotter and a full tank of gas. People have also caught the fish of their lives about four hundred yards from a marina taco stand.
Striped bass are not native to any of it. Somebody hauled a train car of them out from the East Coast in 1879, dumped them in the bay, and the fish looked around at all that water and all those forage species and decided this would do nicely. A hundred and forty-some years later they run up into the sloughs on the tide and sit against the tules waiting for something to make a mistake. What we are describing is a New Jersey fish that moved west, learned to like pears and asparagus country, and never once wrote home.
You want the last of the incoming and the first hour of the outgoing, which means you want to be idling into a slough at a time of morning that no reasonable person would choose. The fog sits on the water in sheets. The levee banks are black. Cows watch you from up on the road with the total lack of interest that only cattle can achieve. And you throw a walking bait along the reed line and work it slow, and for the first forty minutes absolutely nothing happens, and you begin composing the small speech you will give later about how it is nice just to be out here.
The guide we ran with out of Bethel Island has been fishing that maze since he was a kid and navigates it the way other people walk to their own kitchen at night. He does not use the plotter. He uses a specific dead willow, a specific bend, and a pump station he claims has been broken since the Reagan administration. When the tide finally turned he did not announce it. He just said, alright, and the water on the outside of the reeds started moving, and three casts later the surface folded over the plug like a trapdoor.
They came in a twenty minute window and then they were gone, the way they always are. Six fish, one of them a hair over fifteen pounds, all of them fighting like they still think they are in the surf at Island Beach. After the bite died we sat in the slough eating sandwiches and listening to a tractor somewhere on the other side of the levee. He said the Delta gives you twenty good minutes a day and eleven hours of scenery, and that the trick is being in the right slough for the twenty. We asked which slough. He looked at us with real kindness and started the motor.