When fishing a bucktail jig through and below the baitfish schools, stripers aren’t at all finicky. It doesn’t take an expert to recognize the strike of an aggressive winter striper.

“I cast or jig with bucktails when I’ve seen the fish and they are concentrated,” he said. “Watch for birds and baitfish. The birds always tell you where the fish are feeding. But the loons will give you a false reading. They drive the bait up just like a striper will. They will also show up on a depthfinder like a striper.

“Once you see the fish, there’s no question about a striper hitting the bucktail,” Hall said. “When they are on top, they’ll hit it as soon as it hits the water. I just cast and reel it back in when they are on top. They think it’s a minnow swimming by and they eat it and you set the hook. The same goes for jigging. You drop it down to the level of the fish and jig it a couple of times and the fish hits it hard. I like the round-head style with the eyes painted on it. I usually use white, but sometimes I might switch colors to chartreuse.”

Lake Gaston is the next lake downstream of Kerr Lake. The lake is over 20,000 acres and is 34 miles long and approximately 1.5 miles wide at the lower end. It has over 350 miles of shoreline. The Gaston Dam was completed in 1963, and Lake Gaston borders the counties of Mecklenburg and Brunswick in Virginia and Warren, Halifax and Northampton in North Carolina. Normal height of the lake’s surface water is 200 feet above sea level and by regulation the water depth may vary only one foot plus or minus from the normal level except in case of emergency, while Kerr Lake’s elevation varies a great deal for flood control. As at Kerr Lake, a valid license for either Virginia or North Carolina permits fishing from a boat in either state.

“At Gaston, the way I fish is about the same as at Kerr,” Hall said. “But there are not quite as many stripers, although there are some larger fish. I know there have been some 35- to 40-pound fish caught there. I think the reason is that when they pull water from Kerr Lake, the water is always colder because it comes off the bottom of the lake. At Kerr, there is a thermocline and when the fish are trapped in that zone when the water gets hot in summer, the first ones to die are the bigger fish. The difference in the maximum size of the fish is due to the colder water at Gaston.”

Hall launches at the ramp located at the dam and at Poplar Creek access area. He said intimate knowledge of the lake is mandatory before running around the lake with the throttle wide open.

“You have to know what you’re doing,” he said. “I have a GPS with a lake map showing the bottom contours so I don’t hit the shallow places. You are pursuing the fish into the shallows, but all of a sudden there’s a rock under the boat and that can be dangerous, putting dents in your prop or damaging the fiberglass.”