By Steve Scott
Targeting stripers in August with mid-eighties surface temps meant paying close attention to the DO reports and the thermocline. Dropping bait or artificials above the striper’s best quality water was ludicrous, but dropping within or below that zone brought success. For the most part that zone was between 30’ to the bottom. While these striper catches were mostly in the 25 to 30” range, there were occasionally some 30” plus fish.
September brings us the downline bite and the trailing end of the trolling bite be it down riggers, Lead Core 8-9 colors with white on white or Dipsy Divers. Downlines fished at the boat and/or from planer boards will be the ticket for this month. Be sure to use a heftier planer board as the weighted downlines will tend to dig into the surface making your board less visible. Don’t forget to power reel a 2 ounce bucktail jig tipped with an 8″ to 10″ chartreuse paddle tail or a Ben Parker spoon.
Areas for these methods are the mouths of the creeks about 1/3 back early in the morning until 10am and then arker spoon. in the afternoon deep in the river channel still well below Browns Bridge. Then at midday, the areas for downlines are in depths of 48′ in patches of trees with any slight indentation in the creek channel or small bay off the creek channel and mouths of creeks up to about the 5th marker in each creek.
If you are inexperienced in locating stripers, one valuable asset to have would be other striper fisherman. Staying in touch with others can greatly increase your chances of locating these stripers by networking, whether it’s at the bait store, texting each other, using the cell phone or VHF radio. This sharing of information usually pays off when you are struggling to find stripers.
Update your logs. Be sure to check your logs from previous year-to-date to help you with methods and locations.
TIP OF THE MONTH: Sometimes making the smallest change in your presentation will bring positive results. Speeding up and slowing down or using a split tail trailer instead of a paddle tail could make a difference. Need more details; go to https:// TeamLanier.worpress.com/menu.