At right is a fish finder with rockfish marked on the screen looking like arches.

I recently had the pleasure of fishing with striper guide, Jim Hemby at Lake Anna. Hemby has fished for stripers all his life and he has guided exclusively for them for more than seven years. Striper fishing articles found in this publication nearly always entail bay or ocean fishing. However, when I cannot get to the bay, I found that Lake Anna has a very productive fishery that provides plenty of action for these powerful and tasty fish.

Striped bass at Lake Anna average nearly six pounds, which makes them perfect for eating. While catch and release is certainly not a bad thing, biologists from VDGIF encourage the harvest of legal sized striped bass, which is a minimum of twenty inches. The fish are unable to have a productive or viable spawn due to the lack of current needed to carry their fertilized eggs at Anna.

Spring is a great time to fish for stripers at Lake Anna and as this goes to press the fishing is heating up with the weather. There are plenty of fish to be found all over the lake too. Spring stripers can be found wherever there is bait. Bait is abundant at Anna in the form of threadfin shad, herring and gizzard shad. Finding the bait is a matter of watching your depthfinder.

I found that Hemby equipped his boat with a Lowrance unit very similar to the one I use on my center console. Seeing bait on a good finder is pretty easy. Baitfish can be found anywhere from the headwaters of the Pamunkey and North Anna rivers to Dike 3 at the dam. Basically the bait moves all over the lake. Birds will sometimes point the way to the dinner table but the fish finder is the key. Look for a bait ball to locate the bait.

However, if you find bait scattered in an area near humps or points or a flat you are likely looking at chaos in the form of stripers feeding. Anglers may not see striped bass on their finder right away but they are there if the bait is scattered.

A side planer bait rig hooked up
with a gizzard shad.

Striped bass spook very easily from boat noise at Lake Anna due to all the traffic during the spring and summer so it is important that anglers move on bait as quietly as possible. Use a trolling motor when possible.

While anglers can certainly troll lures such as bucktails and crankbaits for stripers, fishing improves dramatically when using live bait caught from the lake. Large minnows will work if bait cannot be located but a cast net and the willingness to get a little wet throwing the net will pay off in a big way when the fish are located.

Stripers do follow a few rules in their daily feeding routine. On sunny and or warm days they will be found in deeper water. So, those bluebird days are best fished early in the morning in the shallows where bait is located and then move off to deeper water following bait as the sun climbs. On cloudy days that are cooler or rainy the fish will tend to stay in the shallows longer. Clear water is certainly tougher to fish than stained water. For this reason many anglers prefer to fish uplake where the water has more sediment than downlake where it has filtered itself out and is much clearer.

Jim Hemby fishes with live bait on down lines during the early summer. In the early spring he uses side planers too. The side planers move the bait out away from the boat to cover more water while using his troller motor to move along creeks or one of the two rivers looking for the next fish to hit. He prefers using circle hooks in a red color and sometimes will use a trailer hook to get fish that simply smack the bait.

"Sometimes stripers will react to a bait and simply smack it to kill or cull it from nature if it looks sick," he pointed out.

However, when the fish are feeding they are aggressive and will inhale a baitfish without a problem. A trailer hook is a good idea when the feed is not happening and you need to hook up with those fish that are simply doing nature's job of weeding out the poor fish by smacking them to kill them.

Striped bass can be caught on light tackle but a medium action rod mated with a baitcaster reel or spinning reel will do the trick. Lighter line tends to work better than heavy line. Certainly twelve pound test is plenty. Berkley Big Game in the green color is a popular line with Hemby, this writer and many charter boats on the bay.

In late May, June and July, fresh and lively herring fished deep is a dynamite way to catch a limit of five fish at Lake Anna. Herring can be collected with a cast net at Anna.

This happy angler shows us
a Lake Anna striper.

Most of the herring measure between 3-7 inches and are often found in the downlake area during the early summer.

Night fishing at Lake Anna is a good way to beat the heat and much of the boat traffic too. Try Dike 3 at night for striped bass. The water is very clear here and the fish are not as shy at dark in this area. Lake Anna offers plenty of ramps, which generally charge $6 for a launch. The State Park offers amenities for the family, a place to picnic and hike.

Jim Hemby offers families a guided fishing trip aboard his covered pontoon boat. His knowledge will put fishermen on fish in short order and he is more than willing to take the time to teach anglers about the fishery, show spots to anglers and explain how to rig for fishing at Lake Anna. Give him a call at 540-967-3313 to inquire about a trip.