It was a sunrise bite today for stripers. After fishing yesterday I had a pretty good idea where they’d be this morning, 9TM. The morning was heating up again quickly. First striper was on. While it was only 22 1/4″ long I got to show Terry Lee how to use a Seaqualizer. With the surface temperature at 86.1 we quickly measured the striper, took our pictures then dropped him quickly into the cooler water below the boat at the Seaqualizer release depth of 30′. We watched him swim off on the sonar. It was good to see he made it.

A few moments later we got a double. Terry started reeling between head shakes so I concentrated on netting his fish as it seemed to be pulling harder than the last one and I was hoping the second fish would still be waiting on the other downline as the rod tip buried under the surface. When I turned around the second striper was gone. Again we measured, took pictures and this time it was Terry’s turn to use the Seaqualizer. This striper was 24″ long.

After that we were still marking fish in 80′ of water with tree tops at 40′ when our back downline at 30′ buzzed out 98 more feet in the blink of an eye. Terry picked up the rod and started reeling to no avail as the striper went down to the trees. This happened again 20 minutes later. If we had put more drag on the striper would have snapped the line. We decided to move away from the trees but it didn’t matter as the stripers had already moved out. I decided to power reel out in the main Hooch channel. We did mark some fish but they weren’t biting. After that we headed back to the Vanns Tavern bay near the buoys and caught 3 nice spotted bass. First Terry said here’s lunch but after the second spot he said here’s dinner.