Rio Vista Bass Derby and Festival

Every fish entered in the Rio Vista Bass Derby comes to the same place: the Official Weigh Station at 1 Main Street, in front of City Hall, where Main runs down to the Sacramento River. The city boat launch lies at the foot of the street, to the right of City Hall, a short walk away. Across the water stands the Rio Vista Bridge, one of the drawbridges designed by Joseph Strauss, architect of the Golden Gate Bridge, and to the south lie the Montezuma Hills. Anglers may fish anywhere from San Francisco Bay to Sacramento. Each must carry the catch here, present it in person, and tell the Weigh Master when and where it was caught. The Weigh Master is the Isleton Delta Chapter of the California Striped Bass Association.

The weigh station at the foot of Main

The derby runs day and night on the first weekend of October, from 6 a.m. Friday to 3 p.m. Sunday. The Rio Vista Chamber of Commerce puts it on, and the 2026 derby, held October 2 through 4, was the 78th. The striped bass contest is decided by length. At 6 a.m. on the opening Friday a “Target Length” is announced, somewhere between 24 and 30 inches, measured from the tip of the nose with the mouth closed to the fork of the tail. The number goes up on the derby’s Facebook page and website, on the window and answering machine of the Chamber’s Visitor Center, and at the participating bait shops. It is also given on Sep Hendrickson’s California Sportsman radio show. Each adult may enter one striper, and the fish closest to the target without going over wins. First place in 2026 paid $4,000. The official rules list second place at $2,000, and the derby’s general information page gives it as $1,500. A second-chance category lets an adult enter one striper a day for a ticket in a raffle of tackle and gear.

Salmon returned to the roster for the 78th derby. The heaviest salmon wins, and the 2026 first prize was $1,500. In early September the derby’s Facebook page posted “THE SALMON ARE BACK!” over pictures of fish taken on the river near Rio Vista by the crew of the Relentless: Don, Max, and Allyson Jeffries. The post noted that the crew had landed in the winner’s circle “more than a few times over the years.”

Children 15 and under fish a separate derby. They may enter striped bass between 18 and 24 inches, with the fish closest to 24 winning, or catfish of any size. The child must catch the fish, a parent or guardian must be along, and every angler in the derby wears a Coast Guard–certified life jacket. Kids’ prizes are gift cards. The Chamber’s rules state, “We want to encourage the younger generation to learn to fish.”

The weigh station closes at 3 p.m. Sunday. Between 4 and 5 the winners are announced at the foot of Main, and they must be present to collect.

Saturday on Main and Front streets

The festival takes one day, the derby’s Saturday. On October 3, 2026, Main Street and North Front Street closed to traffic in the morning. The Lions Club and the Rio Vista Fire Department’s Hot Shots served a pancake breakfast at the Fire Station from 8 to 11. From 9 to 3 the Lions’ classic car show lined Main and Front, and in the afternoon awards were given from a DJ stage. The Lions write that they “feel that our car show is the best in Northern California.” A Kaiser flu-shot clinic set up in front of City Hall, and from 4 to 7 the Fire Station at 350 Main Street gave children rides on the fire trucks.

The Chamber’s 2026 schedule lists food, nonprofit, and fishing booths on Main at the waterfront, plus a Lions and Hot Shots hot dog stand at a site marked “TBD.” A Daily Republic report from June 2026 said instead that food and craft vendor areas would not be part of the 2026 event. The Soroptimists of Rio Vista sold tickets for their meat raffle. The schedule places the drawing on Sunday afternoon at 84 Main Street, and the festival page places it on Saturday at 3.

Music is played in the bars and restaurants along Main. The main stage is the patio at Hap’s Taps, at Main and Front. Whiskey Kiss, a country, classic rock, and pop cover band, played there on the Friday night of 2026. On Saturday the O’Hara Brothers Band opened at noon with what it calls “acoustic feel good music of your favorite sing-a-long tunes.” The Angel Street Band, billed as a five-piece girls band, followed at 4, and Jane Blonde and the Goldfingers, a British rock and pop tribute band, played from 8 to 10. The derby’s Facebook event also listed Quintasia with The Experiment at Ben’s Friends of the Vine and Groovy Judy at Lucy’s Café.

The weekend opens on Thursday with a ticketed kickoff dinner and awards. In 2026 it began at 6 p.m. on October 1, and the festival page says “a couple of local heroes” were honored. The printed schedule gave the place as 45 Main Street, the Facebook event gave it as the Rio Vista Community Center, and the festival page said “right on the waterfront.”

Fireworks, a carnival, and a smaller footprint

In 2025 the festival part of the derby was condensed to one day, centered on Main Street from the waterfront to Fifth Street. In June 2026 the Chamber’s board announced it would turn its effort toward the tournament. Chamber-produced fireworks were dropped for the 2026 event. “By focusing our volunteer resources and organizational efforts on the tournament itself, we believe we can increase participation, enhance the overall experience, and build a stronger foundation for the future,” the Chamber said.

The carnival had already gone. On its festival page the Chamber explains that its latest quote for amusement rides ran $45,000 to $65,000, that the ride operators were booked five years out in October because of large pumpkin patch events, and that the Chamber had been working at a deficit for three years. It writes that it might someday move the festival weekend to get the rides back. The 2026 announcement on Facebook said that “tightening resources have led to a more focused footprint.”

A salmon in a garbage bag

The derby was first held in 1933, and the Chamber calls it the oldest bass derby on the West Coast. In October 2013 the Lodi News-Sentinel’s Sara Jane Pohlman found the weigh-in on card tables under a white pop-up tent, with a digital scale and a measuring device. That year’s target length was 32.5 inches, and first place paid $1,500. Ken Richardson explained the length rule: “If we keep killing off the big female spawners, then my kids’ kids won’t have anything to fish.”

At 3 p.m. Jeannie Wallen of Brentwood tied up her boat at the Rio Vista dock and carried a black plastic garbage bag to the weigh-in. Inside was a 15-pound salmon. She had fished since she was three. “Today, when I reeled it in, he picked up the radio and said, ‘Jeannie did it again,’” she said of her husband.

That year the Trilogy Fishing Club ran a youth trout pool stocked with about 250 rainbow trout that the Department of Fish and Game had brought from the Sierra. Zach Cullen, 11, caught one by hand as the tank was drained. His friend Taylor Carter, 11, got splashed with tank water and went home with a freezer bag of four trout on ice. Front and Main were closed to traffic and lined with food vendors, pop-up shops, and midway games, and dozens of pre-1974 cars and trucks filled Main Street up the hill.

At the dock Bill and Luanne King came in from a cruise with their black lab and waited for the tide to turn. They remembered the derby drawing bigger crowds in earlier years, and that weekend more fishermen were after salmon upriver than striped bass. “But the dog loves it,” he said. “She’ll jump in any boat.”

Arms of the River

The town itself began farther upstream. In 1844 John Bidwell received the Los Ulpinos land grant on the Sacramento River. On December 3, 1855, the grant was sold off in lots on the steps of the Benicia Courthouse, and Colonel N. H. Davis bought six of them for $440. According to the Rio Vista Museum, Davis surveyed a town plat in the fall of 1857 near the Patwin village of Hale Che Muk, about a mile below the mouth of Cache Slough. He named it Los Brazos del Rio, Arms of the River, because three branches of the Sacramento met nearby. The Chamber dates the founding to 1858. That same year a post office was approved on condition that the name change. “Vista del Rio” was used briefly, and then Mrs. Kirkpatrick, wife of the postmaster Charles, chose “Rio Vista.” The new name was quickly adopted.

The winter of 1861 brought high winds and heavy rain, and in the last days of December the river carried off many of the smaller buildings. Families who lost their homes were taken in by neighbors. The worst came on January 9, 1862, when a storm drove a fierce wind from the southeast and the river rose over its banks. The water stood twelve feet deep at the foot of Main Street, and soon the whole town was under water.

In March 1862 four men from the drowned settlement, Samuel R. Perry, John M. Sidwell, William K. Squires, and Issac Dunham, went to see Joseph Bruning. Bruning was a former San Francisco hotel man who had bought land about 1858 a league down river, on higher ground at the upper edge of the Montezuma Hills. He gave them land on the northeastern part of his property and surveyed and recorded the plat of “New Rio Vista.” T. J. McWorthy, who owned the land to the north, recorded an addition. The town grew from there on river steamer trade between Sacramento and San Francisco, and the Chamber writes that although Rio Vista never found gold, it sent “one of the largest supplies of fresh fish and canned salmon to San Francisco and beyond.” The town was incorporated on December 30, 1893. Main Street, which now runs down to the weigh station, was chosen in 1862 as the dividing line between the Bruning and McWorthy ranches.