Dale Welch- The Striper King
 Where
We Caught ‘Em, and the History of Stripers in
Smith Lake
Editor’s Note: One day in 1988, Dale Welch of
Crane Hill, Alabama, a biomedical engineer in Birmingham,
left his job to go fishing and never returned. No, Welch
didn’t vanish. He discovered a new career and
a new life as a saltwater striper guide on Smith Lake.
Welch has guided for stripers longer than any other
guide on Smith Lake and has caught four Smith Lake records.
Today, we’ll learn some of Dale’s striper-fishing
tactics.
On the day Welch, Hart and I fished, with an air temperature
of 98 degrees, we’d gone on the water before daylight
and fished  dock
lights until just after daylight. We were fishing in
28 to 30 feet of water over a 60-foot bottom. “Stripers
usually move in toward the dock lights about an hour
before daylight and feed on bream and baitfish that
have fed all night around the lights,” Welch reports.
Once the sun rises, the big stripers move back to their
deep-water haunts. During this time of year, you can
find the stripers, 30- to 50-feet deep in the water,
depending on what kind of fronts are coming onto the
lake. The stripers holding in that really-deep water
will move up and feed on the bait. Welch uses his depth
finder to look for baitfish along the thermocline and
as a general rule, the stripers will swim under or  near
the baitfish. However, Welch often finds them out in
open water not related to the bait.
The History of Gulf Coast Stripers:
The state first stocked Smith Lake with the Gulf Coast
strain of stripers in 1983, and today, Smith Lake in
Walker and Winston counties cradles the Gulf Coast strain
of saltwater stripers. These saltwater stripers once
migrated from the Gulf of Mexico up the river systems
to spawn each spring. After spawning, the fish would
return downstream and out into the Gulf. However, the
dam systems erected on many southern coastal rivers,
not only along Alabama rivers, altered the striper’s
migration pattern. And for many years, biologists feared
the extinction of the Gulf Coast striper. To prevent
the loss of this fish, biologists of Alabama’s
Fisheries Section of the Alabama Department of Conservation
and Natural Resources (DCNR) chose Smith Lake to become
the depository of the Gulf Coast strain of saltwater
stripers. Because Alabama’s Fisheries Sect ion
did such as excellent job of protecting these fish,
now many southern state agencies come to Alabama to
get the Gulf Coast strain of saltwater striper to stock
in their reservoirs.
This Gulf Coast strain of saltwater stripers has much
more heat tolerance than the Atlantic strain of saltwater
stripers, which biologists stocked in reservoirs throughout
the country for many years. Today, Alabama’s Fisheries
Section catches female Gulf Coast saltwater stripers
from Smith Lake, artificially spawns these fish and
uses the fingerlings created to stock many of the lakes
in Alabama and across the South.
To schedule a striper fishing trip with Dale Welch,
contact him at: 7932 County Road 312, Crane Hill, AL
35053, (256) 737-0541, dwelch@hiwaay.net,
www.alabamastriperfishing.com.
Tomorrow: How to Catch ‘Em
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