The days when I can actually get on the water and fish for fun are especially precious to me, so I’m thrilled when the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays roll around. They give me plenty of opportunities to take my sons fishing. I can put the deer stand aside or a couple of days and unwind and just have a good time.What does a bass pro do when he wants to fun-fish? I put my boat in across the road at Lake Greenwood, or I drive to Lake Murray or Lake Hartwell and fish for stripers and hybrid bass.
The time the kids have off from school is just perfect, it seems like you wind up at a lot of fish fries, and one of my favorite fish to eat is a striper that’s been filleted, so that makes it even better.
Catching stripers can really be a blast, because they’re a big fish that hits hard and will put up a great fight. And they bite better as the water cools down, because they get more active, and the baitfish, the shad, get more lethargic and become easy pickings.
Of course, the nastier the weather, the better the fish bite, and you might have trouble getting kids out there in rainy, 38-degree weather, but it’s better than not going at all.
There are a lot of ways you can catch stripers, and I’m not even getting into live baiting. You can catch them on a variety of lures, and whenever you can get a hook into one’s mouth, it’s on.
Finding them in the winter isn’t that tough; it isn’t rocket science. If you go to the boat ramp and you have to park a half-mile away, you’re fishing in the right part of the lake. If you show up and put your boat in and park in the first spot next to the ramp, you’re probably not. Stripers will migrate. They’ll start out the fall in the lower end of a lake and work their way up as the water cools down.
A sure-fire way of finding them is to be on the lookout for seagulls. We get a lot of them in on our lakes when winter approaches, and they’re the best indicator you have of where stripers are. When you see birds diving, there will be bait around, and where the bait is, stripers won’t be far away. The birds will be there, because when the stripers drive bait to the surface, there will be easy pickings for them — just picking the shad off the surface.
Whenever I see birds, I head for them, and when I get close to them, I’ll shut my motor down and start watching. If I see any surface activity, I know the stripers are right there. But I’m also watching my depthfinder, a Humminbird 997. It does a great job of marking not only the stripers, but the big concentrations of baitfish. When you can see the bait and the stripers, you can get a pretty good idea of the depth at which they’re holding and what you need to do to catch them.
If I find them schooling near the bottom, I love to fish a Berry spoon, jigging it off the bottom around the fish. If we’re having a mild December and the fish are feeding close to the surface, a big topwater lure like a Zara Spook can be a great striper bait. You can catch them on big jerkbaits, on lipless crankbaits — on almost any bait that looks like a shad or herring that you can get in front of them.
A lot of fishermen in South Carolina like to use a combination bait — maybe a bucktail and a small spoon or fly rigged on dropper loops. I have used rigs like that with great success; it’s something when you get two of them on at a time — and it’s not that uncommon.
Most of the stripers you run into in the late fall and early winter are going to be out in open water, so you don’t need heavy line. I almost always use 10- to 12-pound Berkley Trilene Fluorocarbon. For the most part, even though you might hook a fish that weighs 20 to 25 pounds, you can land them on 12-pound test. You need to have the drag set correctly on your baitcasting or spinning reel — I’m using baitcasting tackle and a Pfleuger President most of the time — but you can usually fight even a big striper and keep him from breaking off. The other great thing about lighter line is that you’ll get more bites.
So take some time over the next few weeks to think about striper fishing. If your sons and daughters like to fish, this will be a No. 1 opportunity to get them a chance to catch something bigger than the usual crappie and bream they’re used to. And they’re almost as good flopping in the frying pan as they are out in the lake.
Davy Hite is a 43-year-old native of Saluda who lives in Ninety Six. He has fished professionally since 1993. He was the BASS Angler of the Year in 1997 and 2002, and he won the 1999 Bassmasters Classic and the 1998 FLW Tour Championship. He is sponsored by Triton boats, Evinrude outboards, All-Star rods, Pfleuger reels, Berkley Trilene, Yamamoto Baits, Owner hooks, Humminbird depthfinders and Solar Bat sunglasses.
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