REEL STORIES

Striper Fishing Techniques

When it comes to striper fishing here in the sound and rivers the fishing is a lot more than just dragging stretch baits by a bridge piling. This can work but you are missing out on so many other fish if you just try to switch things up. When the water temperatures reach 45 degrees the bait will move to deeper water in order to survive.

If you know how to work your depth finder, go to your favorite fishing spot and troll around looking at your electronics with a keen eye until you see a school of fish with a ball of bait fish around or above it. This is almost always stripers following balls of baitfish up and down the rivers. You can sometimes see them under flocks of birds or even a single bird hovering over the water.

When you reach the school drop a swim bait or even a trout bait on a jig head and bounce the bait in the school. If you get good, you can sometimes see the bait falling on your depth finder right to the fish.

One of the things this does is to make the birds follow where the fish go, and right now you can go out on almost any river and on the sound and find a flock of birds chasing schools of bait that are being chased to the surface by the stripers.

Sometimes the fish want a violent jerk with the rod while other times they like it just sitting there in the school so vary your presentation until it works and you get a bite.

Shallow water stripers are another way to catch fish with stump flats on the north side of the river being your best bet.

You can cast a Rattle Trap or swim bait up on the flats and work it back to the boat, or you can troll it through the flats if you dare, but be careful not to lose your lure. This pattern works best on points or sudden depth changes where the channel bends toward the bank or a creek dumps into the river. Set up outside the mouth of the creek especially when the current is moving out, then cast your swim bait up into the creek mouth and

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work it back out to the boat. The fish will be waiting for the bait to move out and ambush them at the points of the creek.

The key to these spots are to mark them, because if you catch them once you will catch them again.

This year the rockfish have been in numbers almost like the old days with big size and quantity and the one key to these schools is the amount of bait that they tend to follow, which is huge numbers in the sound and rivers.

One of the things this does is to make the birds follow where the fish go, and right now you can go out on almost any river and on the sound and find a flock of birds chasing schools of bait that are being chased to the surface by the stripers. It used to happen all the time way back when but now it is starting to happen again.

Look for them around bridges, river mouths or even creeks that dump out into the rivers. Always look at the sky and scope the horizon for these birds and remember there may only be a few birds or there could be hundreds.

When you see these birds,

approach the school as quiet as possible and fish the outside edges while trying to avoid the center.

This will scatter the bait ball and spook the bite. This is just a couple of ways to catch rockfish in our area instead of trolling bridges all day, so next time you are struggling, try to switch it up a little and work something different.

Mike Sweeney is a columnist for The Daily Advance in Elizabeth City and a regular contributor to Eastern North Carolina Living.

Jon Whitehurst (left) and Amber Jones (right) holding striped bass, and are regular fishers in the waterways of eastern North Carolina.

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