There are different ways to go about fishing for the stripes. Although he owns a boat, Myrick most enjoys fishing from the bank.

“I like to fish Sassy Shad artificial lures,” the angler said.

It takes a substantial leadhead jig to hold such a lure down in the turbulent current of a Tennessee River dam. Myrick uses 3-inch, 4-inch and even 6-inch Sassy Shads and often employs as much as an ounce of lead. Myrick readily admits he likes the bigger baits, operating on the “big bait, big fish” theory. He uses a variety of colors, including pearl, bronze, shad and green.

“The Sassy Shad mimics a threadfin shad, which run below the dams by the thousands in the spring,” Myrick offered. “You need the heavy weight to get you below the shad, which are stacked near the surface. You want your lure falling below the column of shad so it looks like a dead or dying shad to the stripers underneath.”

The trick is to throw your lure right beside the concrete wall of the dam and then let it drift downstream with the current.

“In the heavy current, you don’t have a lot of control over where it goes,” Myrick said. “Just let it drift.”

When the stripe bite is right, you get a hit on nearly every drift. Or you might hang up in the jagged rocks below the dams before the fish can find the bait.

“Take a lot of tackle with you,” cautioned Myrick, whose dedicated striper tackle box feels as though it weighs 40 pounds. “You will lose some rigs in the rocks. You need to even take extra line with you. It’s not uncommon for a big striper to take all the line you’ve got on your reel and then break off.”

When you get a bite, especially if it’s a good fish, the common procedure for landing the fish is to walk down the wall, holding your rod over the heads of other fishermen, and their rigs if necessary, and get onto the rocks below the wall.

Myrick explained that it’s a heck of a lot easier to land a fish in the rocks than it is to try to manhandle one up the wall.

The other technique for catching stripers from the bank is to catch some of the threadfin shad and then use them for live bait. The fishing technique is similar to using the Sassy Shad and jig.

The added ingredient in this technique is the challenge of catching the bait. Some anglers use a cast net to catch their bait, but Myrick said it takes more effort to catch them that way. He prefers dropping a wire basket into the water.

“The shad are right there at the wall, and they look like they’re thick enough that you could walk across them,” he noted. “All you have to do is drop your wire basket into the water right there and you’ll catch all the bait you need.”

Threadfin shad are notorious for dying pretty quickly once you pull them out of the river. Myrick advised putting one on your hook, tossing four or five others into a bucket of water for later, and then letting the rest go.

“You’ll get like a million of them with one dip of your wire basket anyway,” he said.

You need to use a lot of lead with your live shad, too. That’s because you want it to fall out of the area where the shad are running, just like you wanted that Sassy Shad jig to fall.

“You have to use as much as an ounce at times,” Myrick noted.