Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

“The reason I started striper fishing was to catch big fish,” offered Irondale’s Cecil Williams.

Williams, a winning striper tournament angler and part-time guide, travels frequently to the Gulf of Mexico to pursue big fish. An outgrowth of those trips, striper fishing gives him an opportunity to catch double-digit-weight fish without making the 572-mile round trip to Orange Beach.

When state officials began stocking saltwater striped bass in 1965, they had anglers like Williams in mind. The release of those and subsequent fingerlings led to the creation of a thriving fishery capable of producing 30- and 40-pound stripers in many Cotton State inland reservoirs.

Initially, Alabama obtained Atlantic Coast striped bass fry or fingerlings from Georgia and South Carolina for stocking. At the time, biologists were unaware that two separate types of stripers existed, the other being the Gulf Coast strain. Having discovering this, they concentrated on saving the native subspecies. Also, feeling that the Gulf Coast striper might adapt better to our waters, they then set in motion a series of events leading to the stocking and recovery of Gulf Coast striped bass.

“About 25 years ago,” explained Nick Nichols, assistant chief of fisheries for Alabama’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, “our agency, along with Georgia, Florida and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, established a cooperative agreement to jointly work to restore our native Gulf Coast striped bass.” As a result, the DCNR has made great strides in restoring these fish to the waters of the Alabama, Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers.

“Unfortunately,” Nichols continued, “due to the fact that those Atlantic Coast fish were stocked in some to these systems back in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, we do have some genetic contamination of those stocks, so our mission now is to restore or at least try to conserve as much of that native genetic heritage as we have left in these populations.

“In the mid-to-late ‘70s, we took some steps that really paid off. At the time, Lewis Smith Lake had never been stocked with striped bass or hybrid bass, so through this cooperative agreement, we obtained the best Gulf Coast fish we could for a number of years and initiated stockings of those fish in Smith Lake with the idea of using Smith as kind of a genetic repository. We also chose Smith because there’s no chance of natural reproduction there. For probably the past 20 years, we have mainly used Smith Lake fish to produce striped bass for stocking in Alabama.

“One of the original interests in the Gulf Coast fish was the thought that those fish would perform better in our southern water than the Atlantic Coast fish. To be honest, no one has been able to pick out a performance difference between the Gulf fish and the Atlantic fish.”

To get an overall look at the stripers’ fortunes across the state, Alabama Game & Fish talked with the supervisor of each fishery district.

The northern districts report that anglers continue to have success on the Tennessee River, even though the state doesn’t stock stripers there. The fish in our section of the river have migrated in from Tennessee.

At Smith Lake, the average fish size has declined, but plenty of big fish are still available, and good numbers of fish as well.

On the northern stretch of the Coosa River, the main fishery, Logan Martin, is stocked every year with five stripers per acre. Weiss Lake has a naturally reproducing population of stripers and is not stocked. Most of the fish weigh less than 10 pounds, though it does produce an occasional big fish.

Inland Lake is stocked at the same rate as Logan Martin and produces big fish. In fact, Williams believes that what he calls a “miniature Smith Lake” will yield up the next state record.

In the central districts, Bankhead Lake received its first stocking of striped bass in 2007, and these stripers should enter the fishery in 2010. Lay Lake on the Coosa has a stable fishery with a mixture of both stocked fish and fish that have moved downstream from Weiss.

Farther downstream, neither Mitchell nor Jordan receives stocked fish, but, like Lay Lake, they do contain stripers that have migrated downstream.

To the east, both West Point and Bartletts Ferry (Lake Harding) on the Chattahoochee River offer anglers good opportunities to catch 20- and 25-pound stripers, respectively. Alabama and Georgia alternate stockings on these lakes.

The premier water in this part of the state is Lake Martin. Like Smith and Inland lakes, Martin provides striped bass with critical thermal refuges formed by a combination of deep and infertile water. These cool-water refuges are essential for the survival of big fish during summer. Lake Martin is home to both tackle-busting fish and solid numbers of fish weighing more than 10 pounds.

Below Martin on the Tallapoosa River, both Yates and Thurlow lakes receive stripers at a stocking rate of one fish per acre. The reduced rate is a result of the limited availability of forage in these impoundments.