Sniping Stripers

When September’s cool nights lower water temperatures, Jordan Lake’s linesider fishing heats up.

The “dog days” of late summer can make striper anglers howl at the moon.But as September arrives, fishermen such as Troy Roberson finally come out of the doghouse. The weatherman throws them a bone in the former of cooling temperatures, and for the striped bass at B. Everett Jordan Lake, the bone is just an appetizer for main courses to follow.

Roberson, who operates Striper Sniper Guide Service, said from the middle of the month fishing starts to improve and keeps improving through Thanksgiving and into December.

It’s a progression Roberson has grown to know and love because it signals some of the best fishing of the year at 13,800-acre Jordan Lake, where stripers haven’t been on the menu for long.

“The last half of September, hopefully, the water temperature will be back in the low 80s, and the stripers will start being more active,” said Roberson (919-656-1887). “You’ll have more dissolved oxygen in the water, and they’ll be coming off a stressful period of time — the summer.

“Fish will moving around, looking for that cooler water and looking for the water that has the most oxygen in it.”

And moving fish are generally feeding, which is just fine for anglers who give up college-football weekends, late afternoons and early mornings looking for fish that were introduced to Jordan only a handful of years ago and have become a favorite target of local anglers.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission annually stocks 70,000 striper fry into Jordan’s waters. Starting at 2 inches, it takes stripers about 4 to 5 years to approach the 16-inch minimum-keeper size at Jordan.

The lake-record striper was an 18-pounder caught during a tournament sponsored by a local striper club of which Roberson is president.

Striper stockings replaced the hybrid white bass-striped bass “Bodie” bass the WRC stocked at Jordan for 10 years. Beginning in 1996, the WRC cut the hybrid stocking in half and made up the difference with stripers. It stopped stocking hybrids in 2001 and replaced them totally with stripers.

The reason? Hybrid bass tend to be mobile and have a habit or working their way downstream, often going through the turbines of hydroelectric dams or over the spillways of flood-control dams and showing up 50 or 100 miles from their original residences.

Jordan Lake is in the Cape Fear River watershed, and with several old dams scheduled for removal, the possibility existed that hybrids from Jordan might make their way far enough downstream to intermingle with sea-run stripers native to the river.

Hybrids tend to outcompete stripers for food and habitat, and the possibility interbreeding between hybrids and pure-strain stripers was something the WRC also wanted to avoid. So the WRC discontinued hybrid stocking at the Cape Fear impoundment, and Jordan started to get a full load of striped bass fry each spring near Memorial Day.

Thus far, the results are promising. Brian McRae, a fisheries biologist who is the WRC’s Piedmont research coordinator, said stripers have been doing well, despite some misgivings biologists had about stocking them in Jordan, a relatively shallow reservoir.

“They look very good,” said McRae, who headed gill-netting surveys the past two winters. “The relative weights for stripers in this state vary widely. We use a method for measuring the condition and health of fish, and the ideal score is 100. The fish at Jordan appear to be in the mid-90s — which is really good for North Carolina. We’ve got a lot of reservoirs that are in the 70s and 80s.

“Jordan is full of forage; it’s one of the most euthrophic reservoirs in the state — very productive. Are the stripers going to hit a ceiling? Probably. Will it be higher than everyone things? Yes, that’s safe to say.

“The forage is probably the limiting factor in a lot of reservoirs, but there’s no problem at Jordan. Water temperatures at Jordan are pretty brutal during the summer, and that was why everybody thought they wouldn’t do well. But they can eat a lot, and that bolsters their metabolism enough that they can do well even in that hot water. And they’re doing well.”

McRae said the WRC sampled almost 175 stripers during the past two years, setting gill nets in December and getting an idea of age, numbers and growth rates.

Roberson is at the lake daily to see exactly how well stripers are faring. He catches a lot of hybrids in the spring and summer, often in the same areas where he’s catching stripers. But during the fall, the hybrids seem to disappear, and he catches stripers almost exclusively, mixing trolling and live-baiting tactics.

“In the latter part of September, you find stripers actually moving deeper in the water column,” Roberson said. “We’ll be catching them in 16 to 18 feet of water.

“You can live bait, and the key is knowing when you’re fishing too deep. If you put a live bait down at a certain depth ,and it starts to die after about 10 minutes, you’re fishing too deep. You’re in an area or depth without enough dissolved oxygen for the bait or the stripers. You need to fish up a couple of feet or until you can keep your bait alive.”

Roberson fishes live gizzard shad or larger threadfin shad, most of them with down lines. He has 15-pound-test Berkley Big Game monofilament spooled on his reels, with an egg sinker of 1 to 2 ounces threaded on the line, which is tied to a barrel swivel. Below the swivel, he ties on a 3-foot leader of 15-pound Berkley Vanish fluorocarbon and ends the rig with a 2/0 Owner circle hook.

“In late September, I’ll fish the main part of the lake,” Roberson said. “(Stripers) will be in the river channel from buoy 3 to 6 — from just above the ‘S’ turns to the Poplar Point area.

“I’ll move the boat using my trolling motor, and I try not to move more than 7/10 mph. I’ll stay right off the river channel break and swing back and forth, or I’ll roll up on an old railroad bed, a road bed or shallow humps.

“By the middle of October, they’ll actually start to run up into the ‘S’ turns, then they’ll go into the Haw River. They’ll actually run up into the Haw, and that will last about three weeks. They won’t really go more than a mile — they won’t go past Robeson Creek — but the Haw River’s channel is more defined and deeper.

“They won’t be right in the channel, but you can catch ’em off points near the mouths of Stinking Creek or Robeson Creek. There are a couple of flats up there that come all the way out to 15 feet before they drop off.”

When October arrives, the surface water temperature typically drops back into the 70s, and fish start to school and chase shad.

“On this lake, little stripers don’t come to the top like they do at Kerr (Buggs Island) or Badin, but they’ll be grouped up here from scattered fish to small schools,” Roberson said. “When you find one, you expect more than one rod to go off. That’s when you start to catch them in better numbers.

“Around the first of November, that’s when they really start to get hot. The water temperature is slipping into the 60s, the bait starts moving out of the creeks, and the fish will follow. A striper’s preferred temperature is 60 to 65 degrees, and that’s when you’re going to see more active fish. They can inhabit the entire water column, and you can catch ’em with live bait, either free-lining or using a Waterbugz planer board.”

Roberson also trolls a double-bucktail rig with lead-core line or uses a down-rigger, especially when stripers become more active and are more likely to school, and also when he’s searching for fish.

“I’m going to be fishing deep, but close to the bank, if that makes any sense,” he said. “I like to fish any kind of bluff bank, any place where the river channel bends in close to a point or close to some other kind of structure.

“They aren’t in the middle of the lake, but they’ll always be close to some good access to deep water. You might catch ’em in 5 feet of water or all the way down to 20 feet — but they’ll be fairly concentrated.”

Roberson trolls with two main rigs, and he’ll use a combination of them when he sets a spread of six rods. The first rig uses a three-way swivel, with a 3-foot fluorocarbon leader (17-pound test) tied to a ¾-ounce bucktail jig with a Gulp swimming minnow trailer, and a 5-foot leader of the same mono tied to a 3/8-ounce bucktail with the same trailer. He likes to use chartreuse, white and greens.

“Most of the bites come on the long leader because it’s the one that’s trailing along,” he said. “The second bucktail is there more for looks, action and attraction. Eighty percent of the time they bite the smaller bucktail.”

Roberson’s second rig is a single bucktail he fishes with reels spooled with 36-pound test lead-core line. He’ll add a 20-foot leader of 17-pound fluorocarbon and attach a bucktail or a ¼-ounce lead-head jig with a 4-inch Gulp swimming mullet grub. He trolls with 9000 ABU Garcia reels and live baits with 6500s.

When Thanksgiving arrives, Roberson is really at home at the lake.

“By the middle of November, I’ve put away gizzard shad for the year because the threadfins are on the move, and that’s what the stripers are after,” he said. “You won’t have any trouble at all catching bait. You look at the mouths of creeks and around bridges, and you’ll see a lot of bait movement. I can throw my 10-foot Calusa cast net one time and have all the bait I need for a day’s fishing.”

Roberson tries to use the smallest baits he can find, typically, threadfins that are 2- to 3-inches long. He’ll fish them with a 1/0 Owner circle hook and try to keep them down anywhere from 12 to 18 feet.

“They’ll inhabit the entire water column from 10- to 20-feet deep; that’s where they’re gonna be because you’ve got good water temperature and dissolved oxygen all the way from the top to the bottom,” he said. “The best fishing really is from Thanksgiving on to about Christmas.”

Jordan’s stripers have been in the lake for 10 years, so they haven’t really had the time to grow to gargantuan sizes. The lake record is 18-3, and Roberson said it’s quite common to see fish weighing as much as 15 pounds — especially during the fall months.

“The quality of the fish is definitely better in the fall; some of the biggest fish you’ll catch all year will be in November,” he said. “You can expect fish up to 15 pounds; that’s a really good fish for Jordan. You’ll catch a lot of fish from 6 to 12 pounds.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see anything (more than) 30 pounds here, but we might see a 25- to 30-pounder in the next couple of years. Still, the majority of fish will be 6 to 12 pounds, and in the spring and summer, you’re still catching hybrids between 6 and 8 pounds.”

As far as hybrids are concerned, they aren’t caught often in the winter. But McRae said the lake still contains a lot of 6- to 8-pound fish, with some fish weighing 11 pounds.

Roberson said he’s caught quite a few small hybrids, fish that would appear to be only a year or two old. With the last hybrids stocked in 2002, that raises a question — are hybrids reproducing naturally in Jordan?

McRae doesn’t think so, but he doesn’t really think it matters.

“It’s possible, but Jordan is not conducive to natural reproduction for stripers or hybrids,” he said. “The current at the New Hope (Creek) side is too slow, and the current at the Haw (River) side is too fast. The eggs can’t suspend long enough and roll downstream far enough to hatch out.

“Could it be happening? Possibly, I don’t think it’s anything we need to be worried about.”