Quote:
Originally Posted by Iceman
I have caught plenty of LMB, but have only targeted stripers twice and have tried to mimic shad with my lure selection. Looking forward to tossing the big trout imitations on the Calstar 90J  |
They are easy to catch Andy. You just have to find fish that are feeding and put something they want in front of their nose. They can be incredibly aggressive when they are hungry.
As a follow up to what I posted above I called a buddy of mine that still fishes stripers where I grew up in North Texas at Texoma and we compared notes about the boom bust striper cycles that lakes go through.
It's kind of what I thought, and then some. In Texas the fish are stocked and with the exception of Texoma Stripers do not spawn in Texas. They started putting them in the late sixties and early seventies. I personally caught my first one a seven pounder fishing with my Dad when I was thirteen. When I turned 16 and could drive I started fishing them every chance I could at lake Granbury and got a 13.5 16.5 then a 18 pound fish in a relatively short period of time.
Here's one of them I think the 18.
I'm like 16 there. That's probably the largest Striper I ever caught at Granbury, I fished it until the early eighties but never got a really big one over twenty.
I started fishing Texoma in 1980 and it was a unbelievable striped bass fishery. I can't give exact number but conservatively I was getting a hundred fish over ten pounds a year. Keep in mind I was going to school just 20 miles away, and then commercially fishing Catfish there during the summers so I was fishing a ton of days but it was not a big deal to get a five fish limit with fish all over 10 pounds at Texoma back in the early eighties. At that time the state record was 34 pounds. In July of 82 I got a 33.5 pound fish, following June I got a 36.5 pound fish but got screwwed because I caught it late at night on a Saturday, and could not get it to a grain scale till Monday because of the Blue laws.
This is that fish in a clipping from the Dennison Herald.
Shortly after I had to leave to go to school in NY, and I never really got to fish it much again, until a few years ago when my Mom died. When I went up and fished there it was the same wide open fishing, but all the fish were in the three to five pound range. Most of the younger guys I met fishing there had never even caught a 10 pound fish.
Here' what the Texas parks and wildlife has to say about it.
".....Lakes that produced numbers of fish over 30 pounds in the 80s and 90s now struggle to produce fish over 20 pounds. According to Roger McCabe, Regional Director of Inland Fisheries, District 2, there are a number of reasons for this. In the 1980s, biologists began increasing stocking rates to improve the population size and catch rate. The trade-off for having more fish is fewer large specimens because of increased competition for food.........
Lake Texoma was first stocked in 1965 and has the largest land-locked population of striped bass in the United States. Natural reproduction occurs annually in both the Red and Washita River arms. No stocking has occurred since the early 1980s. The lake record fish weighed 35.12 pounds and was caught in 1984. This lake has the highest daily bag limit for striped bass in the state: no minimum length, and 10 fish per person per day with only two longer than 20 inches. Texoma’s striped bass population is prolific, and for numbers, no other lake in Texas can compare....."
They don't mention the record for Granbury but my old fishing buddy says the largest striper they've caught there was only 19.5 pounds. He also sent me a link to Fish and Games stats on the fifty largest recorded stripers caught in Texas. Only four of them were caught since 2000 twenty seven of them were caguht in the 90s, and the rest come from the 80s. Both my larger Texoma fish would be on that list if I just had bothered to send in the paperwork. The deal was that back when I was fishing there I was sure there would be 40 and 50 pound fishing coming out of Texoma in a few years, and that Granbury was just a few years behind it. I used to release all my stripers six pounds at Granbury and under ten pounds at Texoma, because I wanted the population to grow, so there would be more big fish down the line but looks like I was wrong on all counts.
So what does this have to do with fishing them in Cal. Well first off I'm making a couple of points. One if your fishing a lake with quality striped bass fishing like DVL hit them hard because it might not last, and two when you catch them keep them because the less there are in the lake the better the fishing is going to be down the road. Actually if you read between the lines what I'm really trying to do is to get you guys to go fish them. They fight great (better then seabass), get big and are good to eat (white flesh almost as good as seabass if you cut the red meat out) and basically in our local lakes you can't overfish them. Hey I'm just being selfish, the more you fish them the more big fish for me down the road
Go get them!!
Jim