ON TOUR
DEtAILs
COSTA FLW SERIES
CALIFORNIA DELTA
OAKLEY, CALIF.
May 11–13, 2017
presented by power-pole
hosted by Russo’s Marina and
sugar barge RV Resort and Marina
Costa FLW series Division: Western
By David A. Brown
photos by jEssE sChULtZ
Winning Angler
Hunter Schlander, Modesto, Calif.
Winning Weight: 57-01 (15 fish)
Stat Line: schlander has competed in the Western
Division for nearly a decade. his FLW resume includes
three other top-10 finishes: fifth at Clear Lake in 2016,
sixth at Lake havasu in 2015 and fifth at the Cal Delta in
2008. he has won $106,497.
Schlander dialed in the perfect lure for a tough post-frontal reaction
bite through a lot of trial and error during practice.
Winning Baits
96
Schlander caught most of
his fish on a Lucky Craft Fat CB
B.D.S. 4 square-bill crankbait
(mad craw). Most notably, he
replaced the crankbait’s stock
hooks with Trapper treble
hooks, which feature a unique
square gap behind the point.
The design is intended to pro-
vide a more secure grip on
hooked fish, and Schlander
says he noticed a difference in
his fish retention.
“With a round-bend treble,
the hook can rock back and
forth and come out. But the
Trapper treble’s square design
keeps it stuck, and they can’t
flex the hook,” he says.
This proved especially rel-
evant during a tournament
where a cold front had the
fish biting less aggressively.
“I had a lot of strikes where
they were just slapping at it. I
don’t know if they were just hit-
ting the top of it or the side,”
Schlander says. “For some rea-
son, they didn’t grab the bait.”
When his crankbait bite
subsided, Schlander turned
to presentations with wacky-
rigged Yamamoto Senkos.
Occasionally, he would use
the Senko as a follow-up bait
to catch one of the fish that
nipped at his crankbait.
Target Areas
Schlander spent most of
his time on riprap banks
flanked by prominent grass
lines. That’s a common Cal
Delta scenario, but Schlander
found the particular setup he
needed in the Central Delta
and South Delta.
The big girls that Schlander managed to entice were set up between
riprap on levee walls and inside grass lines.
“The type of grass that
was in there was hydrilla, and
it seemed you could work
your bait all the way back to
the boat and snap it through
the grass. A lot of the Delta
has this mossy ‘angel hair’
grass, and it’s hard to work
your crankbait through that.
If you found the clean grass,
you could work your bait all
the way back to the boat
without it catching stuff.”
When Schlander picked
up a Senko during lower tide
stages, he ran back to the
North Delta and fished tule
islands. Spots with sparse
pencil tules were his particu-
lar preference.
Presentation Keys
It was all about working
the trough between rocks
and weeds, which is formed
because of the rising and
falling tides that don’t allow
grass to grow in the shallow-
est waters near the bank.
Schlander got most of his
bites in the 4- to 6-foot-deep
range.
“The riprap was key, but
you wanted to be as close to
the grass as you could be,”
he says. “You didn’t just want
to be hitting the rocks on the
bank; you wanted to be in
the trough, close to the
grass, but where there was
still hard bottom.”
FLWFISHING.COM I JULY 2017