Persistent fishermen can catch striped bass on Lake Claiborne pretty much all year long. The four seasons of Claiborne stripers vary a little bit from traditional “seasons,” as Donny Hood outlined below.
Summer
Summer striper fishing really means schooling stripers. From June through early September, stripers seem to school regularly.
Later in the season, cold fronts can slow them down for a few days, but they’ll be back with warmer days.
Techniques for catching them have been covered in the main story here.
Fall
Louisiana weather usually pushes fall back to October, sometimes early November. And the stripers follow the temperatures, not the calendar.
But when fall-like weather sets in the fish tend to quit schooling on the surface. But they still group together and roam below the surface chasing shad schools.
Crankbaits replace jigs and spinners as the best baits. And the fish tend to start gathering more along the creeks and mouths of creeks, but they remain in 15 to 20 feet of water.
Winter
Stripers have a short winter. Usually this time period includes December and January, in terms of changing techniques.
In the cold months, the stripers congregate in 25 to 30 feet of water and aren’t as active, but they still bite.
It isn’t unusual to find stripers stacked near tops or underwater ridges right along with schools of big crappie. That’s why big bucktail jigs and spoons jigged vertically work best this time of year.
Spring
Stripers seem just as glad to see spring come as fishermen are.
The first good catches of stripers start showing up to trollers in the Little Lake area (middle of the lake) along ridges or slight variations in depth, like 25 feet of water sloping up to 15.
Fish seem to stay there because that’s where the shad are. The fish tend to lay in the deeper water and ambush shad when they come over the ridges along the drops.