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Georgia On My Mind STRIPERS

By Danny Patrick

He was correct. Jones hooked up with a nice 6-pound hybrid striped bass on his rst cast near the bridge. Hybrids are a hatchery-produced cross between striped bass and white bass. ey are unable to reproduce and are an excellent sport sh with the aggression of white bass and some of the size of a striper. ese hybrids came from the Georgia DNR hatchery at Richmond Hill, Ga.

I was giddy about the cold, foggy drizzle at 6:30 a.m. when I met guide Drew Jones at the Two-Way Fish Camp on the Altamaha near Darien, Ga. Jones runs charters in the area, and he’s caught more than 300 stripers up to 14 pounds for clients this season. ey’ve had some 30- and 40- sh days, and this felt like a perfect striper day!

All I had to do was get in the boat with my gear and a thermos of hot co ee. Jones was waiting for me with his Carolina ski in the water and a livewell full of gorgeous local live shrimp. As we motored o in the mist through creeks and the winding river, he told me a little about the shing.

Stripers are constantly on the move, and they hunt in packs. Jones dri shes live shrimp on oat rigs to locate concentrations of sh. en he switches to arti cial lures. Slow-sinking stick baits and bucktail jigs with so -plastic tails both work great.

Between Brunswick and Darien, Ga., the Altamaha system is a maze of creeks and tributaries. We stopped at the mouth of a creek on the Darien River, not far from downtown Darien. e tide was still coming in but slowing near the end of the high tide. Jones said to cast shrimp out in front a point where the current split to create a back eddy of slower ow. He said this was one of his favorite striper spots. It was an old ballast pile, where sailing ships from the 1800s dumped ballast weight from their hulls a er crossing the ocean from Europe. ey used hundreds, if not thousands, of 10- to 20-pound round rocks to stabilize their ships during the crossing and then dumped

Jones said he catches true stripers and hybrids together, and that sometimes aggressive stripers move in and take over when he’s catching trout. I threw to the same spot Jones caught his sh and immediately hooked and boated a 4-pound hybrid. e bite was on! We saw them busting nger mullet and had one come unbuttoned right at the boat. But then, as is sometimes the case with stripers, it ended as suddenly as it had begun. anchor and went back to the creek mouth where we started. Now the tide was running out swi ly. We caught several trout and a couple more hybrids before we headed back to the docks.

As we ran past downtown Darien, I saw remnants of old buildings from the 1800s and thought of the history. is was a major port during the early rise of the United States. Cotton and rice from slave plantations were shipped out of Darien, and old-growth cypress trees were logged way up the Altamaha. Loggers would cut trees close to the river and then ra them together in units of dozens of massive logs, which were oated down to the coastal sawmills with men riding the ra s.

Darien is a quiet town now, but it was a truly a bustling place then. It is beautiful with old live oaks and Spanish moss, and history bu s will not be disappointed. If you want to change up your shing and explore a special place, give Jones a call. He can hook you up…

Capt. Drew Jones can be contacted at (912) 242-2502.

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