Cape Fear Stripers

[Topsail Angler]

I have been wanting to get over to the Cape Fear River and fish for stripers. Today was the day for it, low tide was at 2:30 in the afternoon and the weather was forecast to be beautiful. Indeed it was, 75 and not a cloud in the sky with just a light breeze.

At 10:00 we launched the boat at the ramp beside the Memorial bridge in Wilmington and headed up river. We decided to troll for the first hour or so then we would cast to structure on the last half of the falling tide. About 10:30 Chris' rod bent and the clicker made a short sound - no hook up but something knocked it down. My line was further back and when it crossed that same spot - wham! I hooked and landed my first Cape Fear Striper! It was around 20 inches and went for a X-Rap slashbait in white with an orange spot. We trolled that area for a while longer but no more bites.

Then we started casting to structure. There is plenty of it in the river. In fact we lost a handful of lures due to all the hard structure. We were casting bucktails and soft baits having put away the expensive hard baits. Chris landed a 20 incher on a gitzem jighead with a white Berkley Power bait shrimp (not Gulp!).



Then I landed two more fish, these coming on a Storm wild eyed shad in white. One was another 20 incher but the other was a FAT 25 inch striper weighing in at over 7 pounds. He was a blast to haul in on my medium-light trout rod!



Those 4 fish were spread out over a 4 hour period, so we didn't exactly "tear 'em up", but we had a blast and what a beautiful day to be outside. As you probably noticed, white was the color today. We tried a whole lot of other colors in different baits but all the bites came on white ones!