Young Sam Jarrett looked at the bouncing rod tip, his eyes wide in wonder as he looked up at his father, Dave Jarrett.

The youngster was amazed because he'd never held a rod with a fish this big at the business end -- mainly because this was his first striped bass-fishing adventure.

"Hold him, son," his dad said. "Reel him in."

The 8-year-old second-grader at Scroggs Elementary School in Chapel Hill cranked with determination the handle of the Abu-Garcia bait-caster reel, the butt of the 7-foot-long rod bouncing as it protruded from underneath his armpit.

It took a couple of minutes for the boy to reel an 11-pound striped bass to the surface of Jordan Lake. The feisty fish splashed next to the starboard gunwale of Troy Robertson's fishing boat. The veteran striper guide expertly slipped a landing net underneath the struggling rockfish and lifted it over the side to the deck where the small boy could admire his handiwork.

"That was fun," said a beaming Sam, who was celebrating his birthday with his dad last spring. "Can we go catch another one?"

His father looked at Roberson, who said: "Sure, we'll do it again, if another one wants to bite."

It was a promise Roberson (Striper Sniper Adventures, 919- 656-1887, http://www.striper-sniper.com) would be able to keep last spring. His rods kept dipping over the next couple hours as the boy and his father enjoyed an excellent birthday present, catching rockfish with Roberson at Jordan Lake.

"May is the best month to fish for striped bass at Jordan Lake," said Roberson, 36, a former ranger for the N.C. Parks & Recreation Department and currently a public safety officer for the nearby town of Pittsboro.

May is when Jordan Lake's water temperature reaches 65 degrees and enlivens feeding instincts in striped bass all over the lake following April's "false spawn." The lake's two main feeder streams, the Haw and New Hope rivers, don't have enough length to provide a true spawn (striper eggs require about three to four days of tumbling in 65-degree water to hatch) -- but the fish don't know that. So instinct takes over during May and they try to spawn anyway, struggling upriver as far as they can go.

Once attempted reproduction activities are finished, their spent energy and weight needs to be replenished. So stripers cruise Jordan's shorelines, looking to fatten up on baitfish before they head for deeper water when summer arrives.

Roberson's fishing tactics change as May progresses, although the baitfish he hooks to his trolling rigs do not. They're good for shallow or deep striped bass.

"You can use threadfin shad, which are smaller, even bass shiners, the early part of the month," he said. "Stripers are hungry and they'll eat anything you put in front of them."

Roberson said anglers can buy shad or shiners at several bait-and-tackle stores near the lake or catch their own gizzards or threadfins.

He uses a cast net to land shad.

"Jordan is a shad factory," Roberson said. "It has an abundance of both threadfins and gizzard shads.

"You can buy 'em or use a cast net to catch 'em under the bridge at Farrington or the (N.C.) 751 bridge between the No-Wake buoys. You don't even have to see 'em; just throw a cast net four times and you'll have 70 to 100 baits."

Early in the fifth month, Roberson likes to use 4- to 6-inch-long threadfin shad, but as the month goes on and fish go deeper, he prefers big gizzard shads, sometimes as long as 9 or 10 inches. He also has a tactic that makes stripers more likely to attack his baitfish.