I want to tell you about a unique fishing method for catching BIG stripers. This method has become prevalent among fishermen in Georgia and South Carolina. I witnessed the results first-hand last week while fishing with my brother, Josh, on Clark Hill Lake near Augusta Georgia. Over two days, we caught 20 fish averaging 13 pounds. Our biggest fish each day was 19 and 18 pounds, respectively.

Before I go into the details, I must warn you -- this fishing method is gruesome and bloody. If you have a weak stomach, or are a sissy, or if your name is Bob Angello, you should not read any further. For the rest of you, start by getting some live shad, preferably 4 to 6 inches in length.

Finding Fish.

During the summer, we all know stripers are looking for cool water. They are going to be stationed or traveling very close to the main river channel or a deep creek channel. Find a hump located near the channel with a steep incline into the channel. If you mark fish in a place like this on or close to the bottom, they are probably stripers. In Clark Hill, for example, the fish were on humps between 25 and 35 feet deep near a river channel that was 120 feet deep.

Use what knowledge you have about the lake you are fishing to determine where to look for fish. (The stripers on Percy Priest are not likely to be much deeper than 20 feet during the summer because the deep water is oxygen deficient.) Study some lake maps beforehand and take your time finding a spot that you are confident in. You must be patient to fish using this method because you will stay in one place for several hours, sometimes all day.

When you find the spot you want to fish, toss out a marker buoy right on top of it. Graph a circle around the buoy. You will be casting your lines out from the boat, so get an understanding of the various depths in which your baits will be resting. Position the boat so that baits covering a 360 degrees circle at a casting-length’s radius around the boat will be resting in the depths you want to fish. Now you have to learn how to anchor.

Anchoring is a skill that is learned through much trial and error, though mostly error. Don’t even bother trying this fishing method unless you have 2 Hooker-style anchors of a size suitable for the length of your boat. Each anchor must have at least 3 feet of heavy chain connected to about 200 feet of rope. If one anchor has 200 or 300 and the other has 100, that will work but the more rope the better. My brother uses 600 feet of rope on one anchor and 300 on the other.

Steer the boat into the wind and drive about 100 feet past your fishing spot. Drop one anchor off the front of the boat and back up until you let out all the rope. Continue backing up until the anchor is caught solid. You should now be 100 feet or more past your fishing spot with the boat still facing the wind. Now, drop the second anchor off the back of the boat and shut off the engine. Pull your boat toward the front anchor until you’ve let out a great deal of rope on the back anchor. Then drag the back anchor until it is caught solid. You should be directly on top of your fishing spot with the anchor ropes pulled so tight an acrobat could walk on them.

Here’s where it gets ugly and expensive. I hope you got a good price on all that anchor rope because now you need a bunch of bait rods and reels and sturdy rod holders for all of them. I use the Abu Garcia bait cast reels because they hold a lot of line and cast well.

You’ll want to maximize the number of rods you have. That way your baits will cover a large area and a variety of depths. Take a partner who owns some rods. I recommend using at least 8 rods. My brother and I fish with 20 rods on a 19-foot boat and I know a guy that uses 34 rods on a 28-foot boat.

What size line you put on the reels is up to you, but be aware that big stripers will hang near trees and will run into them when caught. You sometimes need to be able to tighten down the drag and "manhandle" these fish to keep them out of trees. That’s why I use 20 # test.

For the terminal tackle, put on a 2 ounce egg sinker followed by a barrel swivel, a leader not more than 12 inches long and a 1 or 2 ought Kahle wide bend or plain wide bend bait hook. Take the live bait and place the hook in the belly and run the shank deep into the gut so that the point comes out just below his gills. Now, using a pair of chef’s scissors or utility shears, clip about a quarter inch of the tail off the bait.

Cast your bait out as far as you can. Continue to peel line off the reel so that the bait sinks straight to the bottom. Then the put the rod in gear and place in the rod holder. Continue casting out all the rods at slightly different angles from the boat. Put them off the front, the back and all six sides. Cast each one toward a particular landmark on the horizon so that you can be sure they are spaced close enough and to ensure maximum coverage.

After you anchor and get all your rods positioned you have one more thing to do-Chum! Take about 10 bait and cut them into pieces not bigger than your thumbnail. It’s real easy to do this using a pair of heavy duty "Fiskars" brand or similar chef’s scissors. If you have bait left over from previous trip, you can freeze them for chum. If not, you can just use live bait. Sling the chum out using an old tennis racket. Chumming is very important. We perform an autopsy on all our fish and they often have a handful of chum in them. Though the cause of death determined by the autopsy is always the same (fish pronounced dead as a result of acute trauma inflicted during live autopsy), the autopsy is beneficial because the chum and bait recovered can be reused.

I think it is important to cut your chum as small as possible so that a fish has to eat your whole bait to get a satisfying meal. If you fish in one spot for a long time, like you should using this method, you should chum at least once every hour. Resist the urge to check your bait unless you think it has been hit.

You’ll know a strike of a striper when it happens. Catfish will slowly pull the line at an angle. Stripers bend the rods good, sometimes double, like a striper that attacks live bait. When one hits, set the hook hard. I believe you cannot set the hook too hard on a striper. Because the hook is so deeply embedded in the bait, a hard hook set is necessary to rip the hook out of the bait and increase the odds that the point of the hook will find its way into striper flesh.

When you hook a striper on a set-up like this, the fight can be long and tiresome on you and the fish. As I said earlier, the fish may run for trees. If you get a sense that this is happening (usually after you have lost one or two on that side of the boat), you should tighten down your drag before the fish hits so that you can keep him from getting control at the first instant.

Amazingly, when you get the fish up off the bottom (stripers will tend to surface away from the boat eventually) you can work around all the other lines without getting them tangled. If you do get tangles, it is often worth it because that means you have a fish so big that it keeps your line deep during the first 5 minutes. The last 5 minutes is spent untangling and even clipping other lines and cussing out your fishing partner as he does it.

The fishermen in Georgia and South Carolina will tell you there is not any better method to catch big fish during the hottest part of the summer. Last weekend, my brother and I caught our biggest fish, 19 pounds, at 2:00 in the afternoon in 90 degrees heat with an 83 degrees surface temperature. We caught a 27 pounder this time last year on the bottom in 60 feet of water. Several times during the fight of that fish, I thought what I had on the end of the line was not a fish, but a tire attached to small truck.

The 1st and 2nd place fisherman used this method in the "Lake World Striper Tournament", on Lake Murray in Columbia, South Carolina. Over 90 boats competed in the tournament last June. The 1st place winner sat on the same spot from the tournament start at until 4:00 PM in the afternoon. His confidence came from catching a 30-pound fish there the week before. He landed a 25 pounder and several fish in the high teens to win the $2500 each for big fish and first prize in the tournament. He was not accustomed to fishing that lake and found his spot by studying a lake map a few nights earlier at his kitchen table.

The lesson learned is that those who wait can catch big fish. If you want to learn more about this fishing method, check out the web sites for the Striper Kings, Midlands Striper Club or Clark Hill Striper Club. All three of these sites have message boards where fisherman from all over the southeast post questions and get answers.