Tackling Barnett striped bass

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the rockfish action heats up on the Rez this month. Here’s what you need to know.

Idling around the mouth of Pelahatchie Bay, Kyle Thompson from Madison, Miss., had one eye on his sonar graph and the other on the water around him. He was targeting Ross Barnett’s resident population of sea-run striped bass and hybrids. 

The fish are notoriously hard to pin down and Thompson’s best plan is to just happen across them on any number of underwater points, ledges and humps.

Thompson patterns stripes like a black bass fisherman, even though most black bass anglers, or crappie anglers for that matter, don’t care much for stripes. He marks them on a particular piece of structure, backs off a half cast and tries to hit the right angle to present a jigging spoon, wing ding, or underspin jig head paired with a swim bait to the fish. 

“If they’re schooling, like early in the morning or on an overcast day, they’ll hit just about anything you throw at them,” Thompson said. “The fish are easier to mark on the graph early in the day, but easier to catch when the sun gets higher in the sky.”

The reason he targets them like largemouth is because they act a lot like largemouth in a reservoir where bass see a lot of lures in their lifetime. If you can find them feeding, it’s game-on, but later in the day, the fish hold tight to structure and you have to run a bait right under their nose to get a reaction bite.

“It’s also tougher on the weekends with a lot of recreational traffic that tends to spook fish and make them even more nomadic,” Thompson said. “I catch more fish if I can get a bait down to the bottom and sort of bounce it along the bottom right across where they’re holding.”

They can be sporadic

Thompson said catches can be sporadic, not just because of the stripe’s behavior, but because he believes a lot of them were lost through the dam two years ago when Ross Barnett had one of its all-time high flooding events.

“These we’re catching now are 4-6 year-old fish with a lot of hybrids mixed in,” he said. “I know they stocked around 25,000 fish last year but I think those were all sea-runs. I guess we’ll see how long it takes for the population to recover.” 

Sea run striped bass have been home on the Pearl River since a time pre-dating modern fisheries management. During the post WWII era when flowing rivers were impounded in the name of power generation, flood control, and water resources, much of the natural range of striped bass across the country was curtailed in the name of progress. It was also about this time biologists discovered these fish could survive completely in fresh water though they had a difficult time reproducing in the shortened runs. This discovery led to the revelation that striped bass could be reproduced in hatcheries and survive quite well as a put, grow and take fishery.

Though striped bass can be caught throughout the reservoir at various times of the year, Zachary Young from Brandon, Miss., claims it’s much easier to concentrate fishing efforts in the lower part of the lake during the late summer months when stripes seek out deeper water.

Close to the river

“This time of year, you can find them all the way from the spillway north to the S curves in the mid-lake area,” he said. “The fish seem to prefer being relatively close to the river channel, especially around the 15-foot humps that run close to the river channel where there’s 40 feet of water close by. Sometimes you’ll see them run in a big school right on the bottom or on the edge of the ledge and they’ll be holding in 13 foot of water down to about 20 feet.” 

Although many anglers chance upon Barnett’s striped bass in pursuit of other species, Young said his was a conscious decision to find them.

“I had witnessed other people catching them and I had read about them,” he said. “I guess I just wanted to chase a fish that really pulls hard and is just different from what you expect to see in Barnett.”

Though he has narrowed the lake down to a specific area for his search, Young takes a systematic approach to locating specific schools of fish. 

“I started studying lake maps and running some of these ledges on the river channels, looking for different humps and things like that until I finally found what was described in the articles,” he said. “They’ve got a couple of hideouts.

“I’m pretty much just trolling for them. We mainly use the standard 200 or 300 series crankbaits that guys around here use to troll for crappie, pulling five to six rods at a time.” 

Experiment with techniques

Once he was on the fish, Young began doing some experimenting with his techniques and baits, gaining a lot of insight from a striped bass fishing guide he befriended from out of state.

“We also started pulling some bucktail jigs that a striper guide out of North Carolina makes,” he said. “I’ve talked to him a good bit about how they fish up there and it works pretty good here as well.”

Since he was rigged with proper crankbait trolling accessories, meaning rod holders and electric trolling motor, Young used that as a basis for his striper fishing, then speeded things up.

“I’ve seen some boats use their big motor, but I troll using an electric trolling motor with the speed and steering controls on it,” he said. “I’ll go at least two miles an hour — you really can’t go too fast for these fish. I’ll stay from two miles an hour all the way up to 2.4 mph.”

Trolling isn’t the only tool in Young’s arsenal, though he does stick to strictly artificial baits for his striped bass fishing. He has found that on occasion, the big fish will push their way to the surface, typically early and late in the day and can be caught by casting to them. 

“We’ve caught them with spoons and Lil’ Georges, and other baits like that when they come up schooling,” he said. “I’ve also seen people catch them using plastic swim baits, but the fish have to be up in the water. It’s just too hard to get those swim baits to the depth you want them to be when you’re trolling because you’ve got to add so much weight to them.”

Managing the put, grow and take fishery

Since 1974, striped bass have been reared at Turcotte Fish Hatchery, located on the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area adjacent to Ross Barnett Reservoir. It is the only producer of the species in the state. Curt Summerlin is the hatchery supervisor and has seen countless broods of striped bass come and go through the hatchery. 

“Barnett is 33,000 acres. Our target stocking rate is about 150,000 per year so that equates to say, about 5 fish per acre,” said Summerlin. “Those numbers are not set in stone. Some years we’ll have more emphasis on hybrids and some years more emphasis on stripers. Of course, when you’re dealing with animals, they’re not always cooperative, so you’ve got to take what you can get.”

Establishing a put, grow and take fishery in an impounded reservoir may sound easy, but does not exist without its challenges. Summerlin claims it’s much more complicated than just dumping fish in the lake.

“One of the main changes that occurred during my time is to discontinue stocking the Atlantic strain striped bass,” he said. “We’ve gone back to the Gulf strain striped bass — fish that are originally native to this area. The Gulf striped bass are native to the rivers that empty into the Gulf of Mexico, stretching from Florida to extreme East Texas. They are just a genetically different fish from the Atlantic strain, those striped bass from the Eastern Seaboard that migrate to the Atlantic.”

In order to sustain the fishery, Summerlin and the biologists at Turcotte use electro fishing to collect them when striped bass make their annual spawning runs up the Pearl River — when the fish are literally knocking at the door of the hatchery.

“We collect our brood fish via electric fishing or electro shocking when they migrate during the spring,” he said. “Our main objective is to keep that population strong, striped bass-wise, since that’s our source of brood fish for producing both stripers and hybrids. We collect them right here, from down below Barnett Dam.”

The Turcotte hatchery uses the white bass female/striped bass cross to produce its hybrids. Male striped bass are collected on site but the biologists must travel upstate to get the white bass.

“White bass are not native in the Pearl River drainage,” he said. “The Pearl is geographically isolated because it runs through the center of the state straight to the Gulf. Most of your rivers connected to the Mississippi have white bass in them. Those rivers connected to the Mississippi do have white bass but the Pearl system does not. We use North Mississippi impoundments — Enid, Grenada and Sardis, to get our white bass.”