May 28, 29 2026
I’ve wanted to book a day with the legendary, “Wizard of the Delta”, Mike Costello for years. The problem is, so has everyone else. Mike is booked solid years out by repeat clients who guard their dates like trust funds — the man has the availability of a Supreme Court seat. Half my fishing buddies have landed their personal-best stripers with him, which is exactly the kind of thing they remind you of, repeatedly, until you want to push them in the water.
Now, here’s the thing about striper guides on the Delta: there used to be a bunch of them, and the herd has thinned. The reason isn’t mysterious. The Bay-Delta striper population was something like four million fish in the early 1960s, fell to about a million by 1980, and the sport fishery has been sliding ever since. The commercial fishery got shut down long ago, and the rest has been managed mostly by hope. Spots that printed money from the late ’90s to around 2010 — Franks Tract, Mildred Island, Discovery Bay, the sloughs — are now about as productive as a parking lot. When the official advice is “keep moving,” that’s code for “the fish moved out and didn’t leave a forwarding address.” Hard to run a business on that. You can’t bill a client for sightseeing.
Which is the whole point of Mike. Thirty-five-plus years of experience have given him a kind of fish-radar that borders on witchcraft — he doesn’t find stripers so much as the stripers seem to surrender. He wrote the book on it, literally, Fly Fishing the California Delta, presumably between catching everyone else’s personal bests.
My buddy Richard Crook has fished with Mike a dozen-plus times and books several double days a year, like a man who knows where the bodies are buried. When he invited me along, I said yes before he finished the sentence. Richard and I go back to San Luis and the Forebay, but after he moved we’d been failing to coordinate a trip for ages — turns out the Delta with Mike is the rare compromise that’s an equal 2.5-hour pain in the neck for both of us. Bromance.
The first day opened with rain, naturally, because nothing says “premium fishing experience” like sitting in a boat getting soaked on without rain pants. But Mike pulled fish out of damn near every stop. We finished with 39 fish, 17 keepers, and a solid half-dozen in the 4-to-7-pound range. Then at slack tide the whole thing turned magic — a pack of stripers came up smashing bait on the surface, and we got to throw topwater at them on a Ron Dong crease fly, which is about as much fun as you can legally have with a fly rod.
I hadn’t fished the Delta in a while, and it reminded me why I fell for it in the first place. There’s something about tidal water — alive, scheming, always up to something — that makes a flat reservoir like San Luis or the Forebay feel like fishing a bathtub. I’ve missed it.
That evening, Richard retired to his much nicer digs in Lodi while I couldn’t help but think back to my own stay at the Motel 6 in Elko during last year’s Wildhorse trip. Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but I swear I could almost smell the familiar blend of cigarette smoke and industrial-strength bleach that seemed permanently embedded in the walls of that place. Fortunately, those memories faded quickly after dinner.
Before turning in for the night, we stopped at Lucy’s Diner in Rio Vista. The old Point Restaurant at the marina had finally closed after more than 30 years, and I was worried we’d be limited to fast food options. As the song goes, I figured we’d be “stuck in Lodi again.” But Mike mentioned that some of his regulars liked Lucy’s, so we decided to give it a shot. What a pleasant surprise. Thursday night happened to be Prime Rib night, and Lucy’s served up a prime rib that was darn near perfect. Richard ordered one of their Italian dishes and was equally impressed. The service was classic small-town friendly, the portions were generous, and the prices were more than fair. It turned out to be one of the best meals of the trip.
For anglers fishing the Delta, Rio Vista’s Delta Marina Yacht Harbor is a fantastic base camp. I stayed in their small waterfront RV park with full hookups, located right next to the launch where Mike meets us each morning. I literally brewed a thermos of coffee, stepped out of the Synabeggo, and about twenty-five steps later was climbing aboard Mike’s boat. That’s about as convenient as fishing gets. The trick is to reserve an RV site and arrive the day before. Then, first thing in the morning, move the RV to a prepaid parking spot for the day. Mike’s fishing hours don’t always match the marina store’s hours, so it’s smart to prepay everything in advance. The staff will leave your permits and paperwork in the famous “White Mailbox” outside the office. It’s a simple system that works great and lets you focus on fishing instead of logistics. There may be better ways to start a fishing day, but brewing coffee in your RV and walking twenty-five steps to the boat ramp is going to be hard to beat.
For our second day, the weather report called for sunny skies and 75 degrees. Apparently the meteorologist had accidentally pulled up the forecast for Maui. Instead, rain hammered the RV all night long. I woke up to gray skies, wind, and conditions that looked better suited for duck hunting than fly fishing. Undeterred, Mike pointed his Kingfisher west and mashed the throttle. We launched across the Delta at nearly 50 mph, pounding through waves. After twenty minutes of that ride, I wasn’t sure whether I needed a chiropractor, a dentist, or a hemorrhoid specialist. Probably all three. If you’ve never hit Delta chop at that speed, imagine riding a mechanical bull while balancing a cup of hot coffee. When we finally arrived at Mike’s favorite spots, we found exactly what we were looking for. Nothing. Not a fish. Not a dink. Not even one of those fish that follows your fly just to hurt your feelings. Now I know why Mike is so against owning a Livescope. I wouldnt want to know if there were fish there either.
Now this is where having a guide like Mike pays off. Most of us would have spent the next three hours convincing ourselves the fish were “about to turn on.” Fishermen are masters at this. We can stare at empty water all day and call it optimism. Mike simply shrugged and said, “Let’s go.” A few minutes later we were racing back north. That’s the advantage of fishing with a guy who has both the knowledge and enough horsepower to relocate an entire fishing operation before lunch. The move worked. By midday we’d caught up with the previous day’s numbers and the fish kept coming. One of the things I enjoyed most was Mike’s running statistical commentary. Every spot on the Delta came with a full actuarial report. “This bank produced three double-digit fish in April.” “Best odds here are during an outgoing tide.” “We’ve landed six fish over twenty pounds from this stretch.” At times it felt less like fishing and more like sitting through a PowerPoint presentation prepared by a gambling addict from Las Vegas.
I began feeling a strange pressure to catch the largest fish mathematically possible from every location. Oddly enough, I liked it. Then I realized something even more disturbing. I do the exact same thing to people who fish out of my boat. Apparently I have become that guy. The Delta stripers themselves fascinated me. They look like the fish I chase at San Luis and O’Neill Forebay, but they’re different creatures entirely. It’s like discovering your cousins were raised by wolves. Richard caught a couple of pike minnows that looked large enough to have voting rights. Even more entertaining, several bigger stripers tried to eat them on the way to the boat. Nothing boosts a pike minnow’s self-esteem quite like being chased by a predator twice its size.
The fish clearly weren’t shy about eating big flies. They also seemed to have a serious addiction to crawdads. Watching what came out of their stomachs convinced me there may actually be some magic in Bryce Tedford’s red Clouser patterns. Mike is also a huge fan of Steve Adachi’s flies, and after this trip I’m certainly not qualified to argue with either of them. By day’s end we’d put roughly forty fish in the boat, including around twenty keepers and more fish over twenty-two inches than we’d landed the day before. The better fish looked like they spent their off-season in the gym. Compared to stripers of similar length from San Luis and O’Neill Forebay, these Delta fish had shoulders. Real shoulders. Shoulders that suggested personal trainers, protein shakes, and perhaps a mild steroid program.
As the day went on, Mike and I discovered we shared many of the same friends from the Northern California and Montana trout-fishing world dating all the way back to the 1970s. The fishing community gets surprisingly small once enough gray hair enters the equation. Then I learned that Richard had just defended his Senior Club Championship the week before by shooting a 68. A sixty-eight. Meanwhile, I occasionally celebrate finding the cart path on the first swing. At that moment I decided that if given the choice, I’d much rather be better than Richard at golf than fishing. Unfortunately, after spending a couple days with him, I’ve concluded he’s better at both. That’s a pretty impressive fishing partner. I’ve always believed that the fastest way to improve at anything is to spend time around people who are better than you. Fish with great fishermen. Play golf with great golfers. Keep your mouth shut and pay attention. This weekend I had the privilege of doing both with Mike and Richard. I learned a lot, caught a pile of really nice stripers by San Luis standards, and came home with a renewed appreciation that no matter how much you think you know, there’s always somebody nearby ready to remind you that you’re still fishing—and certainly golfing—in the minor leagues.
