Sturgeon is tasty!

Especially smoked sturgeon.

I do agree with you, but 99.9% of folks that boat the Delta don't even have a local map, let alone an actual NOAA Chart.

That fact is proven practically every w/e with the damaged boats that are towed up to the ramp...

(I have one, BTW)

Maybe some of those are on the chart or in the notice to mariners?

Check on these charts here.

18660
20,000
San Joaquin River Stockton Deep Water Channel Antioch to Medford Island

18661
80,000
Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers Old River, Middle River and San Joaquin River extension;Sherman Island

18662
40,000
Sacramento River Andrus Island to Sacramento

18663
20,000
San Joaquin River Stockton Deep Water Channel Medford Island to Stockton

18664
20,000
Sacramento River Sacramento to Fourmile Bend

18665
40,000
Lake Tahoe (Metric)

18666
10,000
Suisun Bay Middle Ground to New York Slough

18667
20,000
Sacramento River Fourmile Bend To Colusa

Excuse my ignorance, but what is egeria?

It's kind of a fresh water type of kelp. It sort of looks like the stuff some folks use in aquariums.

It grows wild out here since it was "introduced" either by accident or malicously (sp). It grows very quickly and is very visible in shallow water.

The five fingers anchorage used to be clogged with it. If you run a generator while at anchor, it can get sucked up into the raw-water intake and wreak havoc with the cooling system.

Various county agency's have tried to eradicate it, with little success.

Evidently, from the info posted here, five fingers has cleared up somewhat.

And that is a good thing...

Also, it is not exclusive to the Delta.

The marina at Lake Berryessa last w/e was full of it.

Our other issue in the Delta is the water hyacinth.

They've been battling that since I was a teenager...

Egeria Densa actually is an aquarium plant. It looks like this: http://plants.ifas.ufl.edu/images/egeden/egeden.jpg You often see it in pet stores. I could never get the stuff to grow in an aquarium, but it grows like crazy in the Delta. By the end of the summer, it gets thick in some parts of the Delta. It has really taken off in my marina lately. It was so thick in and around the Five Fingers a couple of years ago that I had a huge ball of it on my outdrive before I even got near the fingers.

There was a state project to kill off egeria in Franks Tract last year. The theory was that Franks was a "hatchery" for it and killing it off there would reduce it elsewhere as well. Maybe it worked?

Just for kicks, go to chart 18661 and to page 25.

Just below the top of the page, where it says to connect to page 19, you'll see the five fingers anchorage that we are referring to.

Yep, there are five fingers!

I never realized that it was actually an aquarium plant.

Though I knew that it looked like it!

It sure is a nuisance...

Is that also on Chart 18663, page 8, near Mandeville Island?

Yep that's it. A little north of Mildred Island. My marina is on page 10.

Interesting that much of the sounding information is lacking from those charts.

But the deep water shipping cut is maintained and charted with current information for shipping purposes. In the area marked Mildred Island is it consistantly deep enough for water sports or do you have to be very carefull or only do it during high tide?

I've never actually been in Mildred, but my understanding is that there are a couple of submerged orchards to avoid, but most of it is fairly deep (by delta standards anyway). It is a popular anchorage though and I'm guessing you might not make many friends by running around pulling wakeboarders and tubes inside. There aren't any good "lake type areas" to use for watersports that I know of. Franks Tract (another flooded island with failed levees) is shallow and you need local knowledge to avoid several obstacles. I've never been brave enough to cross it, I always go around it. There are several wide sloughs with light traffic I use when we take the kids tubing.

It's a very different boating environment than the lakes of northern MN and Canada I grew up boating on (almost as long ago as ABoater ) It isn't as scenic as those places, and the water isn't the clear blue stuff I was used to, but I find it an interesting place to go boating because there are so many places to go and see. I've been boating on it for three years now, put about 150 hours on my boat, and haven't come close to seeing all of it.

On the paper charts and my Garmin GPS, there is much more sounding data than you see on the online charts. Except for the southern part of the Delta, most of the major waterways have depth information.

Yeah, Mildred Island USED to be an actual island. They grew sugar beets there.

One of our favorite catfishing holes (for years) was in Latham Slu right across from the levee break which created Mildred. They decided to keep it as extra water "storage" after the levee broke. Too costly to reclaim.

It has turned into quite the anchorage and bass fishing area. The entrance where the break occured used to be about 15 to 18 feet deep. Now it is about 50 to 60 feet deep!

I've seen too many folks use (so-called) entrances to Mildred with sad results. There is only ONE actual entrance. The other "openings" are actually eroded levee spots.

We've spent plenty of nights on the hook with the Sea Ray club (and on our own) in Mildred. We noticed a considerable drop in the usage of five fingers with the "creation" of Mildred.

The egeria situation certainly didn't help...