Published: August 18, 2008 08:07 am         

BARRY ST. CLAIR: Striped bass secrets

The largest striped bass I ever caught was taken by drifting a six-inch shiner in 65-feet of water on a warm September afternoon.

Actually, my friend Bruce and I had three fish slam our drift lines at the same time and managed to land two of them. We were quite proud of ourselves. Two novices bobbing around Lake Texoma in a small aluminum boat and catching giant fish were the stuff legends were made of — at least we thought so.

On hand-held scales each striper weighed close to 20 pounds. To say we puffed our chests out with righteous pride would be a small understatement.

Whether it was luck or not had little bearing on the outcome. We had joined the ranks of trophy striper fishermen and had the fish to prove it. That happy day was a milestone for my fishing career. I have been addicted to catching the mighty striped bass ever since.

Stripers have been stocked into many Texas water ways during the last three decades and provide outstanding opportunities for freshwater anglers to tangle with a fish that can reach trophy sized proportions.

Striped bass exist in Texas as a put and take fishery with one exception — Lake Texoma. Big T has the enviable reputation of being the only lake in Texas with suitable habitat where striped bass successfully reproduce annually. Stripers need a river system with the proper amount of salinity and length of flow to keep their eggs free-floating until they hatch—which Texoma provides.

Stripers roam open water areas in schools looking for their primary prey — threadfin and gizzard shad. When they feed, they are raiders, slicing through pods of bait like a sickle mower through a grassy meadow. Slash and burn, striped bass will round up a school of bait, decimate it and then move on. Their feeding behavior sometimes includes pushing the hapless shad to the surface and destroying them with wolf-like thoroughness. That trait creates an adrenaline high for anglers lucky enough to get in on the frenzy. Toss a shad imitating lure into a striper feeding melee and hold on partner—you are going for a ride.

Key places to look for striped bass are submerged islands, points of land that fall abruptly into a creek channel or flats cut by timbered creeks in water twenty feet or deeper. All of these places are potential spots to find schools of shad and striped bass. Stripers do not constantly roam open water looking for prey to ravage. They will take advantage of staging areas and capitalize on the schools of bait that are also attracted to them.

For example, I used to fish Lake Tawakoni consistently and got to know certain areas that regularly held fish. One of them was a cut between submerged timber flats in 40-feet of water. The cut was about 50-feet wide and four hundred yards long. A main creek channel ran parallel to the edge of the timber. Stripers would move up and down the creek channel following the schools of bait.

The cut served as a short-cut between the mid lake channel and a long sloping point on the other side of the timbered flat. It was a natural travel area for bait fish. The timbered edges were tailor made for stripers to stage and ambush the schools of shad moving through it.

We fished that spot several ways. One was to glide along the cut with a trolling motor casting 1-ounce white buck-tailed spinner jigs to the trees and letting them fall to about twenty feet before retrieving. This method worked great when stripers were relating to cover and not following schools of bait.

When lures failed in that spot, we would use live 4-6-inch shad hooked through the nose rigged Carolina style, with a 1- ounce barrel weight three feet above the hook. Leader material had to be at least twenty pound strength tied to a 3/0 Aberdeen bait hook to land them. Stout leaders were necessary because we fished these rigs straight down at the edge of the trees along the cut. The idea was to ambush the line-sides when they moved through following the schools of bait. When a striper inhaled a shad, it would do one of two things: run for the open cut or bulldoze into the trees. I lost count of the quality fish caught from that sweet spot during the years we fished there.

Striped bass fishing is exciting stuff. They are not that difficult to catch once you know their secrets...and, they provide Texas anglers with the chance to battle a trophy fish with out having to pay much more than the cost of a fishing license to do it.

Barry St. Clair is a guest columnist for the Athens Daily Review. His columns appear weekly.

     

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