When you tie into a big striper on a fly below West Point, you'll either boat him or lose him fairly quickly, Edmonds asserted. "The water you're likely to be in is 8 to 10 feet deep, and there are a lot of rocks," he said. "And he's going to cut you off pretty quickly if you don't get him in. It took my client 15 minutes to bring the 43-pounder in."

Striper fishing tends to be a feast-or-famine sport: Either you catch a lot or you get nothing. "Fifty-plus fish a day is not uncommon on the Chattahoochee," Edmonds emphasized. "But you may go and not catch anything." He also said the best fishing tends to occur early and late in the day.

Stripers are open-water fish. Look for threadfin shad near the dams, and you should be able to find some stripers nearby. "They're out hunting the shad," Edmonds explained, "and they're going to be close to where the shad are. Neither the shad nor the stripers like real warm water, so you'll find them deep in the cool holes in the summertime."

In the fall, he continued, the baitfish move to the backs of the coves; anglers can then follow them and catch them on lakes rather than in tailraces. "There's no doubt that there's nothing like fishing for stripers -- in freshwater around here anyway," Edmonds summed up. "You'd have to go west and fish for steelhead or salmon to have a similar experience."

The 43-pounder was estimated to be 14 or 15 years old, one of the original fish from the earlier stockings in Bartletts Ferry.

GUNTERSVILLE DAM STRIPERS
The 43-pound stripe that came from below Guntersville Dam is an even more interesting fish when you consider that the state hasn't stocked any stripers in that stretch of river in well over a decade.

"Even though we haven't done any stocking, the population of stripers seems to be stable," said fisheries manager Nick Nichols. "We think there are a couple of different things going on."

As one line of thought has it, a substantial number of striped bass come down out of Tennessee and find their way into the impoundments in the Alabama portion of the Tennessee River. According to Nichols, it's also possible that some fish are coming up the river from downstream; it wouldn't be difficult for fingerlings to negotiate the dams from either direction.

"We can't confirm it, but we have suspicions that there is also some limited natural reproduction taking place at the upper end of Wheeler Reservoir just below Guntersville Dam," Nichols added. "There's a fairly long reach of riverine terrain there. In the spring, there are good flows that would be conducive to natural reproduction."