Greg Burgess of Huntsville boated this 43-pound, 3-ounce striper in the tailwaters below Guntersville Dam. Photo courtesy of Greg Burgess.

When the striper bite's on in North Alabama, it can be an awesome sight to behold. Just ask Greg Burgess.

The Huntsville angler, a diehard largemouth enthusiast, hadn't had a lot of experience fishing for stripers -- at least, not until April Fool's Day of 2004, when a friend took him striper fishing below Guntersville Dam and, as day broke, he and his buddy found themselves in the thick of a swarm of monster-size fish.

"You could see the fish boiling on top of the water all around us," Burgess recalled. "We were fishing with Sassy Shads, not topwater baits, but you knew the fish were there."

On his second cast of the morning, Burgess hooked and landed a 26-pounder, enough to make the morning a success in its own. But on his sixth cast, he tied into yet another good one.

"The fellow I was fishing with, Frank Mokry, asked me if it was as good as the first one I'd caught," Burgess said. "I told him I didn't think so, even though it was like pulling up a radiator. Then, a few minutes later, the fish comes up and rolls on its side and Frank says, 'That's a 40-pounder!'"

It took Burgess and Mokry about 20 minutes to get the lunker into the boat. Digital scales in the boat showed the striper to weigh 48 pounds, 4 ounces.

For a while, the men thought they had a new line-class record, because Burgess remembered that the state line class record for 12-pound-test was 46 pounds. But when they weighed the bruiser on certified scales later in the morning, the fish tipped those scales at 43 pounds, 3 ounces -- just shy of the hoped-for mark.

"It was a little disappointing to not get that record," Burgess said, "but not much, since we had such a big fish to be proud of anyway."

Burgess and Mokry were on the water at daylight, motoring up to the dam and then drifting back and fishing with the current -- standard practice for catching stripers in the spring whether you're fishing with artificial lures or live bait. Although the bite had been strong when they arrived, it turned off within 45 minutes and they were essentially finished.

The Tennessee River below Guntersville Dam is not the only waterway to have given up a 40-plus-pounder in the last couple of years. A client of fishing guide Kent Edmonds caught another 43-pounder last summer on a fly rod just below West Point Dam on the Chattahoochee River, which forms the Georgia-Alabama border.

"It's unofficially a lake record," Edmonds said. "I say 'unofficially' because we put the fish back in the lake."

The lake that he was talking about is Lake Harding (better known as Bartletts Ferry, after the dam that impounds it). Unlike more-conventional striper fishermen, Edmonds specializes in using fly gear and big saltwater streamers that imitate injured minnows to fish for those stripes.