In late May of 2001, I ran into a gentleman that I had met through a friend in Jacksonville. Ted Mayhew was in the Salty Feather, John Botko’s fly shop, when I stopped to pick up some fly tying materials on my way through Jacksonville. He had just returned from North Carolina where he and some other members of Jacksonville’s flyfishing club had gone to fish for Spring run stripers in the Roanoke River. He showed the many pictures he had taken of the fish they caught on the trip. He had been impressed enough with the quality of the fishing that he vowed to go every year during the first week of May, which is usually the best time to fish for the spawning stripers. Luckily, Ted invited the membership of the FBBF to participate in future years.

In early April of this year, I contacted Ted to get the details on this year’s trip. He told me exactly where to go, where to stay, where to eat, when he and the others from Jacksonville were going, and how to catch the stripers. So, I notified the FBBF membership to solicit participants and referred to Ted’s article, which appeared in last June’s FBBF newsletter, for incentive. Cal Allen and I were the only FBBF members that made the trip this year. Here’s how it went.

We left Tallahassee on Saturday morning, May 4, to make the 12-hour drive to Weldon, N.C. As we drove through South Carolina, the rains began and, when we stopped to refuel, I was glad that I had thrown a pair of jeans and a jacket into my bag before leaving home. It was chilly as it was for the next couple of days. But, it was a welcomed break from the spring heat of Tallahassee, which seems to have appeared earlier than usual this year.

The Jacksonville guys were not scheduled to arrive until Monday. Cal and I had no clue where to go since the fish had not moved up the river to the area where they usually spawn. So, we followed a tip on the internet that said the fish were about ten miles down the river where cabins were located on a high bluff. We were not familiar with the rocky river, but we were able to follow another fisherman as he set out for the same venue. We fished all day Sunday and I caught 3 fish while Cal caught none. The following day, Cal caught 4 fish and I caught only one. So, at the end of two days of fishing, Cal and I had caught 4 fish each.

The guides were grumbling about the absence of fish and were canceling parties to avoid disappointing their clients, who come from all over the U.S and Europe to fish for the spring run stripers. The owner of the local tackle shop was puzzled and said that during the 20-plus years that he had been around, he had never seen it when the first week of May was not spectacular for striper fishing among fishers using all types of tackle. The theory was that the low water, which were about 10 feet below normal due to drought conditions, was the culprit. It was looking like Murphy’s law had set the fate of this long trip from Florida.

We searched for optimism and found some in a report from the biologists who were surveying the river that said "green" females had been located down river about 80 miles. We were hoping that they were swimming rapidly upstream. Also, we had seen some spawning activity that second afternoon, even though we did not catch many fish. Stripers spawn as a single female releases her eggs near the surface while a school of anxious males compete for position to fertilize the eggs. This frantic activity results in a short period of thrashing water that can be heard and seen for at least a couple hundred yards.

Tuesday morning, our third day on the water, we landed 36 stripers. That afternoon we caught 5 more for a total of 41 for the day. We saw much more spawning activity that afternoon, so we were again optimistic about the next morning’s fishing. The first fish that I caught that last morning was a 5 ½ pounder, which was the largest we caught on the trip. We caught a total of 31 fish that morning and headed home.

We didn’t catch the 100 fish per day that the city boasts on their website, but we caught a lot of fish and had a lot of fun doing it. Let’s do it again next year.