Hybrid bass are notorious for their hard-fighting ability and April may just be the best month of the whole year to catch them.

Even though hybrids are generally sterile, their genetic programming leads them to swim upstream to spawn this time of year. That means they end up congregating below dams by the hundreds, if not the thousands.

Live shad are the preferred bait, but they also bite artificial lures, primarily in white or chartreuse color. The fishing can be explosive, with some hybrid stripe specimens weighing as much as 12 to 15 pounds and the rare individual pushing 20 pounds.

Nick Nichols, a longtime fisheries biologist with the Alabama Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, is as knowledgeable as anyone in Alabama about the state's hybrid bass. He spent about 20 years working in the Marion Fish Hatchery where the state's hybrids are produced. Today, he's the assistant chief of fisheries for Alabama in charge of research.

Alabama once stocked as many as 1 million hybrid stripers a year in the state's waterways, but the number is now down to about 300,000 a year. Two things were key in the decision to cut back on the number of hybrids being stocked in the state. First of all, fishing for hybrids never really caught on with any great popularity among Alabama's anglers.

They're something of an incidental catch. Fishermen are tickled if they get into a school of hybrids and catch a bunch, but no one much goes out and specifically targets them.

Secondly, the state has shifted its emphasis to restoring Gulf-strain striped bass to many waterways across the state.

Today, most hybrid stocking takes place on the Coosa River, where terrific fisheries for the species exist below Logan Martin and Neely Henry dams, or on the Tenn-Tom Waterway in western Alabama, where there's good hybrid fishing below Demopolis and Gainesville dams.

There are "incidental" hybrid fisheries on the Tennessee and Chattahoochee rivers, Nichols said. While Alabama is not stocking hybrids in great numbers on either waterway, Georgia stocks quite a bit on the Chattahoochee. The river forms the state line and both Alabama and Georgia anglers benefit from the Peach State's stocking efforts.

In North Alabama, hybrids and stripers stocked in Tennessee are finding their way down the Tennessee River into Alabama's portion of the stream.

Nichols said hybrids are actually known to use the lock system to get from lake to lake on the Tennessee River and some ongoing research is being done on that phenomenon. He said it's much more common than anyone ever thought previously.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE HYBRID
Just what is a hybrid striper and what is the benefit of stocking them rather than a regular striped bass?

Nichols can easily explain that. A hybrid is a cross between a striped bass and a white bass. In most Southeastern states, the cross involves a male striped bass and a female white bass.

Not so in Alabama. Here, the cross is a female striper and a male white bass. The cross results in the so-called "Palmetto bass," named for South Carolina where it originated.

"A lot of states don't have access to a good supply of striped bass brood fish, but we do," Nichols noted.