Been off the water for six weeks. Lost track of the Stripers. Used my log from last year to determine what area I would target. However, water temps were 15 degrees hotter this year. I chose to fish north anyway up in the Hooch because the Stripers should still have headed north for the pseudo spawn. I took a couple dozen Bluebacks, a couple dozen medium shiners, one mongo shad and four smaller shad. Last year I was successful using Trout but this year the bait shops were saying still too warm for Trout. Today’s crew was Marcus and Darrin. We launched at Don Carter State Park around 7ish which was semi daylight. Water temp was 70 degrees. As soon as we cleared the launch area we started getting our spread out to be ready by the time we got to the channel. Our spread consisted of 4 planer boards, 2 diagonal bobbers, 1 Freeline and 1 long range bobber; respectable. As we started getting the bait out we noticed that all 2 dozen shiners were dead. No matter, we had plenty of other baits to put out. I put on Pandora and we started our pull up river. After the first ten minutes our left planer board went under. Unfortunately it was a gar that cut our bait in half. Soon after we got a spotted bass on another planer board. Music started cutting in and out, down to one bar of coverage. Our next strike was a catfish coming on a diagonal bobber. By this time the music had stopped completely. About an hour later as we were putting out a Blueback Herring something pulled at it on the surface before getting the right side diagonal bobber onto the line. It was a Striper. Go figure. Things quieted down for a while and crew started humming and singing. I had to do something as I couldn’t stand their off note grunts so I started to play some ringtones. Although they were only 10 seconds long it helped break up the silence. After running through all that I had we went back to silence. About that time one of the reels started screaming with our back planer board going under. No fish on. Apparently a Striper used his tail to stun our 14″ Mongo shad and render him in shock. All three of us jumped to our feet shouting out instructions to Darrin. Well we were wrong to tell him to start reeling in the strike with some drag. We should have just waited for the Striper to come back and eat the shad. We basically brought the shad back to the boat pulling the Striper’s meal away. Lesson learned. At this point we were back to silence and then the humming started again. I started to play the ringtones again as the crew shouted out “oh no not another ringtone” so I stopped. We didn’t get any more bites after that so it was time to head back to the ramp. We had a trifecta today catching three species of fish.