Cool weather brings huge thrills to Arkansas’ Lake Ouachita in form of heavyweight striped bass. The big stripers move shallow and feed aggressively this time of year, creating tremendous excitement.
The cooling temperatures of late fall prompt Lake Ouachita’s gizzard shad to move up the lake’s creek arms, and where the shad go, the striped bass always follow. The migration leads both baitfish and the stripers shallow, creating really fun fishing opportunities. Adding to excitement, the stripers tend to get very concentrated through the cool months.
Lake Ouachita stripers average 8 to 15 pounds, according to long-time guide Hugh Albright. However, any fish that bites is apt to weight 30 or 40 pounds on this lake, and November is a great month for catching a really large striper.
When the fish move up late in the fall, some of the best action will occur on the surface. Schooling activity becomes common, especially early and late in the day and on drizzly or overcast days. Even when the fish aren’t truly schooling, they often will push the baitfish shallow and will break the surface sporadically.
When the fish come up, Albright usually casts to them with either a Heddon Super Spook or a Cotton Cordell C-10 Red-Fin. He can’t point to a single condition that makes one better than the other, but the stripers show definite preferences on certain days. Therefore, Albright usually will start out with someone on his boat walking a bone-colored Super Spook and someone else doing a slow V-wake with a big Red-Fin – usually in rainbow trout, Smoky Joe or chrome/blue.
When schools go down or when widely scattered fish have been breaking in an area, a Red-Fin tends to be more effective than a Spook for calling individual fish to the surface, Albright has found.
He also likes to throw a white or white and chartreuse Bomber Flair-Hair Jig into schooling fish and to areas where schools have gone down. He cranks the Flair-Hair Jig back just beneath the surface and holds on tight. Even when fish are actively schooling – busting baitfish all over the surface – a Flair-Hair Jig sometimes will produce more fish or larger fish than a topwater lure.
When the stripers won’t come to the top, which most often occurs on bluebird days, Albright goes down after them. He searches fish out with his graph, looking over ledges, humps and points in 18 to 25 feet of water, and fishes for them from straight overhead with a Cotton Cordell C.C. Spoon. The stripers can’t resist a flashy spoon dancing and dropping among them.
The shallow action on Lake Ouachita generally heats up in early November and stays good throughout the winter. The fish school less from January through March, but the fishing remains fabulous, Albright said. In April they begin schooling hard again!
To book a trip on Lake Ouachita or learn more about the lake’s big stripers, give Hugh Albright a call at (501) 767-2171.