Photo by Ron Sinfelt

While a lot of fishermen are winterizing their boats this month, cleaning out their tackle boxes and taking apart their reels for a good cleaning and oiling to prepare for the spring fishing that's 10 weeks away, Troy Roberson and Joel Richardson are really getting excited about fishing right now.

That's because the two fishing guides understand that cold weather can mean hot fishing, especially if you're concentrating on striped bass and your home base is either Jordan Lake or Buggs Island (Kerr) Lake.

Stripers aren't exactly turned off by water temperatures that are cold enough to shut the mouth of a largemouth bass. In fact, as the mercury drops below the 50-degree mark, stripers are really starting to get into the swing of things, dogging schools of baitfish and feeding actively for long periods of time.

At least that's what Roberson and Richardson are counting on.

Roberson operates Striper Sniper Guide Service on B. Everett Jordan Lake south of the Raleigh-Durham area. As president of the Jordan Lake Striper Club, he has been guiding for three years -- roughly half the time that the sprawling reservoir has had stripers (the white bass-striped bass hybrid having been stocked there for years).

Richardson, a pro bass fisherman from Kernersville, guides just about everywhere in the Piedmont of North Carolina, but his primary turf is Buggs Island (John H. Kerr), which straddles the North Carolina-Virginia state line north and west of Henderson. He has a cottage on the lake and has guided winter striper trips there for years, normally beginning in mid-December and going through early February.

Their wintertime tactics, like their home waters, are similar only in their effectiveness. Roberson concentrates on live bait during the winter; Richardson uses artificials.

"I basically stick with two basic strategies in January: fishing shad on free lines or fishing them out on planer boards," Roberson said (919-656-1887). "I'll usually put out two rods with planer boards on either side of the boat and two free lines off the back of the boat -- one with a split shot and one without.

"I like to fish with smaller baits during the winter, 4- or 5-inch threadfin shad, and usually you can catch shad. It isn't hard, at least not on this lake," he said. "I don't use the big gizzard shad that you do other times of the year. Threadfins are the weaker of the species, and during the winter, they're dying off, and the stripers will be feeding on them. With a striper's metabolism at this time of the year, a small bait is ideal for them. But I will normally have at least one gizzard shad out at a time."

Jordan is a relatively shallow lake, with very little water any deeper than 25 or 30 feet. There is some 50-foot deep water in the main channel close to Jordan Dam, but for the most part, it's one of the shallower lakes around that is home to stripers.

The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission stocked the lake with hybrid bass after it was impounded in the early 1980s. They thrived for 15 years, but in the late 1990s, the commission rethought its stocking plan. Worried about hybrids' propensity for escaping a reservoir and moving downstream, biologists feared that hybrids would get out during a period of extremely high water (like Hurricane Fran, for example), using the spillway to access the Cape Fear River below. With dams being destroyed well down the river, the potential for mixing hybrids and pure-strain stripers that move out of salt water into the river to spawn became a reality.

The commission cut its hybrid stocking by 50 percent and replaced those fish with striper fingerlings, then, in 2000, quit stocking hybrids completely but doubled the rate of striper stocking.