I was down there Friday night from about 5pm until 9am. We started out int a creek trolling until dark and caught nothing. Once it was dark and I started to move to a new location I noticed all sorts of boats around me so I figured we were in the right creek. The shad were going crazy everywhere but no stripers were heard. We moved out to the main lake and caught the first fish of the night around 11pm. It came in at 23 1/2 inches. I moved on to some flats and the sound of shad completely disappeared so I went back to where we were. Around 1:30am I couldn't stay awake and beached the boat. I threw out a couple lines with shiners right were the shad were going nuts and took a nap. Two hours later I woke up, pulled in all the lines without a single bite, and started fishing again. We continued in the same creek and had the same story, lots of shad and no stripers.

Around 4am I gave up on that creek and tried the one next to it. Again we could hear the shad but no stripers. First cast out of the boat as the bait hit the water the silence is broken with a huge splash. A couple more cast an another blowup at the bait. Within 5 minutes of getting into the creek we had the first striper, another 23 1/2 inch. The next 2 hours were crazy about every 10 minutes we either had a blow, a hit that came off, and occassionally a striper that actually made it to the boat. I had a keeper that got to the boat but due to the darkness and the treble hooks he got caught at the mouth of the net and we couldn't get him in. In the process of trying to get him all the way into the net he managed to get free. About 30 minutes after my keeper got away my friend did manage to pull in a nice 12.5lb striper. Again it got caught at the mouth of the net and I could see it was starting to pull away. It only had 1 hook of a back trebel left and it was through the thin part of the gill!!! I stopped trying to get the fish in the net and let it settle down. Then I reached down and grabbed it by the mouth to pull it in the boat! I saw Fred Mcclintock do that in In-Fisherman and new it could be done. We had one other keeper that just barely made 24". When the sun came back up I switched back to trolling and gave him a jig with a trailer to throw. He managed to pull in a striper trolling and he caught one one the jig. In all my friend who had never caught a keeper striper caught his first keeper plus at least 5 other undersized stripers.

All the fish were hitting about 10 feet off the bank instead of right on the bank. They seemed to pick up after the moon went down and it got really dark. We were throwing redfins and slivers. I switched a joined Rapala in the last creek and was having much better luck with it than the slivers. The hooks got bent up really bad though, I guess the Rapala wasn't made for stripers nailing it.