Catch of the day

It was raining and the dawn was trying to turn a paler shade of gray as Gary Scarberry nosed the boat out of Catfish Bay Marina on Lake Texoma.
We were heading toward Texas, 12 miles south, where Gary said schools of stripers were roaming in about 40 feet of water near the channel of the Red River.
“We’ll see if we can get the birthday boy some fish,” he said.
In this case, the birthday boy was my dad, Joe Blansett, who celebrated his 83rd birthday by joining me and my brother on a striper excursion with Gary as the guide. My brother, Brendan, had been striper fishing with Gary several times, but it was a new adventure for Dad and me.
We had a couple of brief, non-productive stops about five miles from the Texoma dam, but then anchored in about 30 feet of water where the river channel swung within a few hundred yards of a swimming beach. The location offered stripers the happy combination of plenty of shad and the security of easy access to nearby deeper water.
The stripers were there in force and they were hungry for the threadfin shad Gary had caught earlier that morning. From the time Brendan boated the first striper, it was pretty much non-stop catching until we hit our limit of 40 stripers plus one wayward sand bass that was hanging out with the wrong school of fish.
We had the lake to ourselves, thanks to the slow, steady rain and low clouds. We covered a lot of water and saw only one other boat. The other potential striper fishermen stayed dry by staying off the lake, but they truly don’t know what they missed.
This was serious fishing fun. Stripers are aggressive and pack more wallop per pound than just about anything else you’re liable to catch in Oklahoma. Even the smaller ones, Brendan said, were fun to catch.
We were fishing three or four cranks off the bottom with shad hooked on two-foot leaders below sliding barrel sinkers. Several times, stripers hit before the sinkers hit bottom.
The first ones we caught were on the small side, but the more we caught, the bigger they seemed to get. We topped off with a couple of five-pounders near the end.
Having never been on a guided fishing trip, I wasn’t used to having someone else bait my hook and take my fish off the line. It was a guilty pleasure, for sure, but it was nothing compared to watching Gary fillet the 40 stripers plus the wayward sand bass and bag them for us.
Before Brendan headed back to Antlers and my dad and I took off for Ada and Shawnee, we unanimously agreed that it was an excellent way to spend a rainy Wednesday morning and, even more, an 83rd birthday.