Lake Whitney stripers

Went to Whitney for the first time in years yesterday. Put a little smack down on the stripers within a few minutes of getting there. I have never rod and feel fished it before but only bowfished it in the past. Fished from 5pm till dark. Stripers are finicky arnt they? Found them by the thousands but only managed to hook into 3-4 limits between the two of us. Those are my first stripers to target and catch. Do they generally prefer live bait in the summer or are they easier to catch in the morning hours as I suspect? Everything we caught was 17-22 inches.

Great to go to a new lake and get into them right off. Congrats! You got me one step closer to trying Whitney out for myself!

I included the screenshots of where I found them so hopefully you can go get right on them. They loved the splasher and came to it like a dinner bell. Some lakes it works like magic and other lakes I swear it doesn't make a big difference : )

If I went again I would try to take some live bait like maybe some perch or big minnows from a nearby bait shop and just to see if it would be better than artificials. And I would try to fish early in the morning instead of the evening. I was going mainly to try bowfishing at night so evening was a must for this trip and stripers were just a bonus before the night started. The best technique I found was to cast as far out as possible with something heavy like the Littlejohn Slab. Let fall to bottom which his big slab will fall down to 30-40 feet super quick. Reel at a moderate to fast pace 5-7 turns and then let fall back down and as soon as it hits start again without delay. That worked better than anything. I bet trolling would have been productive but I think thats about the most boring and lazy way to "fish" so I don't do that.

Experience talks and BS walks .Well orchestrated and well planned trip Clay. Whitney is a special lake. It contains a lot of stripers sent from PK. How is the shad population on Whitney??

Thank you buddy. Seemed to have an extremely healthy population of Shad from what I could tell. Lots of Shad around the island in particular when searching for striper. When bowfishing we saw a ton of Shad up in a few feet of water along the entire east flats between the island and the bridge. literally the entire bowfishing trip
We watched Shad. Pretty amazing

Thanx for the report, hoping to try Whitney for the first time this weekend.

I hope you have a great trip! The fish were stacked in those two areas so that has to be part of their summer pattern.,my only recommendation would be to bring some live perch and go early in the morning. For all the numbers of fish we saw under the boat it wasn’t impressive to only catch 15-20 in my opinion. So early bite likely is better and having some live bait might be a game changer

Thanx for the information, I will report back.
I'm new to stripers, so catching 15-20 stripers would be a great day for me.

For what it's worth, the last time I was at Lofer's bend I saw a few dead gizzard shads on the beach that were each probably a foot long. I think there's a healthy population. I know at soldier's bluff I see big schools of various fishes, and I catch stripers. My first trip down there in March landed me 15 keeper-sized (but released) stripes in 3 hours. I live in Denton and fish Ray Roberts a few times a week. But I effing love whitney. My ex girlfriend just didn't understand. I try to go every 30-60 days.