So I rarely, if ever, go to Murray and specifically target stripers but I had a couple of friends that wanted to get out and get after’em so I accommodated them.
We hit the water a little after 0700 on Wednesday and were greeted with glass slick calm water in the low 70’s. We headed to a mid-lake spot that I’ve run into stripers at before in the hopes they’d be there…turns out they were. Started working a shallow rocky point and caught a 2lb largemouth on a squarebill crankbait. That’s all that point yielded so we jumped to the other side of the creek and began working a deep flat. We were marking tons of bait and we could see sporadic surface explosions by feeding fish. About a dozen cast with a topwater bait and game on. The first striper hit the deck. Nonkeeper so back he went. After that, the bites came roughly ever 10 casts or so and it was a blast. When the topwater bite slowed down, we’d hit’em with shallow running crankbaits or spinnerbaits. We kept up this rotation for about two hours, consistently putting both shorts and keeper-sized fish in the boat. Around the two hour mark, one guide and one lone boater rolled in on the spot. When I say rolled in, I mean WELL within casting distance of where we were already setup. I wasn’t happy about it but we were still catching fish so I didn’t make a stink about it. Turns out, our lures were out-performing their free-lined herring 2-1, easily. After another hour or so, the spot went cold so we went searching. We would pop one here and one there but no real concentration. Then, on the way to the “last spot of the day,” there it was…I could see the bubbling surface signs of schooling stripers. We cut the motor and drifted within casting distance of the school and it was on. We had the entire school all to ourselves. Violent surface explosion after violent surface explosion…boat flipping 5-7 pound stripers with a face full of topwater baits, one after another. The Humminbird was lit up from the bottom of the screen to the top, from the surface down to th