Myrick’s favorite striper rod is an old Ugly Stik spinning rod with a Mitchell 500 spinning reel.

He said the hybrids have always been his favorite of the striper family, especially when they were more abundant back when the DWFF was actively stocking them in the Tennessee River.

“You could just go out and catch so many,” he said. “They were mostly 2- and 3-pounders, but there were loads of them. I remember once when my father Willie came up and just wore out the stripes below Guntersville Dam. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me his belly because he had a circle bruise on it where he’d held his rod and fought all those hybrids.”

Myrick said anglers shouldn’t be surprised if they catch other fish while they’re targeting stripers on the Tennessee River.

“My dad caught trophy-class smallmouths while stripe fishing,” he said. “People catch catfish sometimes. I’ve caught some 20- and 30-pound freshwater drum while stripe fishing.”

The stripe bite starts in March and can carry all the way into June, but most stripe enthusiasts consider April the peak month.

Keith Floyd said curly-tail jigs are another bait that striper fishermen regularly try. He likes to use jigs in chartreuse, white or smoke. Other popular striper baits include spoons and even topwater lures.

“There can be a good topwater bite, especially early in the mornings,” Floyd added.

While bank fishing can be good, boat fishing is also a solid bet for stripers, according to the biologist. Boat fishermen have a distinct advantage for topwater fishing if they see stripers busting on the surface.

Chasing schooling stripers with topwater lures is a specialized tactic. The more common tactic for boat fishermen is to drift. Drifting for stripers is essentially the same tactic that Tennessee River anglers employ for smallmouths.

You motor up to the dam, toss out a jig or a live threadfin shad, and then drift with the current. Once you’ve gone a few hundred yards, you motor back up to the dam and start the drift all over again.

“The break lines of the current and eddies are the best places to catch stripes,” Dan Myrick suggested. “The bank fisherman is fishing the break line closest to the bank. The boat fisherman is fishing the same kind of break line farther out.”

One advantage that a boat fisherman has over a bank angler is that he can give chase if he ties into an extra-large saltwater striper. That’s exactly what Greg Burgess of Huntsville did when he and a partner hooked into a 43-pounder below Guntersville Dam. That story was presented in the May 2006 edition of Alabama Game & Fish.

When a bank angler hooks into a big fish below Guntersville Dam, it’s fairly common for a complete stranger out in a boat to come in, pick him up and help him follow the fish.

Myrick said there have been times when he’s needed that kind of help himself.

“It’s pretty easy to adjust the drag on the old Mitchell reel of mine,” he said. “I can remember hooking big ones when the fish would peel out 200 yards of line. It’s just stripping off and you’re trying to slow it down with your drag. You see your knot coming up and there’s not a whole lot you can do and -- ping! -- it breaks.”

There’s no way of knowing for sure, he added, but he always feels it’s a giant saltwater striper when that happens.