Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

The first few times I went fishing for striped bass in Oklahoma, we trolled the big, open waters of Lake Keystone with deep-running crankbaits and jigs -- open-water fishing for sure, and always in the summertime.

But my first wintertime striper experience was much different -- and more to my liking. It too was at Lake Keystone, but this time we jigged slab spoons around standing timber in a couple of the larger creeks. We caught several stripers from about 4 to 9 pounds, and I learned that stripers sometimes hold near structure and cover almost like black bass. Saltwater natives that sometimes cover great distances, stripers do tend to roam, and they keep moving most of the time. Still, they'll gather around cover and sit relatively still, at least in well-oxygenated waters.

On a trip to giant Lake Mead on the Arizona-Utah border a few years back, I had the chance to scuba-dive in the huge tap-water-clear lake. On the dive, I was surprised to see with my own eyes that stripers were gathered around structure and holding still, just like black bass or crappie.

I'd been told once by a freshwater fisheries biologist that stripers had to keep moving so that they could get enough water passing through their gills to extract sufficient oxygen from the water. I took that for granted until I saw that school of stripers holding still around a pile of boulders about 30 feet deep in Lake Mead.

I asked another fisheries biologist later if stripers had to keep moving in order to get sufficient oxygen. He said that they can "pump" water through their gills and so don't necessarily have to keep moving -- although, he added, the keep-moving idea was widely believed about several species of fish.

The bottom line is this: At times, stripers do hang around structure or cover much as black bass do, even though the fish often roam far and wide in search of prey.

I've even caught stripers in Lake Keystone brushpiles while I was out after crappie, and taken them in stands of submerged, standing tree trunks in which we sought them out on winter afternoons.

I've almost always used jigging spoons (a.k.a. "structure" and "slab" spoons) or jigs to fish for them in these areas, but I believe that using live bait might be an even more productive method of fishing around structure when stripers aren't on the move. Small sunfish, big minnows, or, best of all, live gizzard shad can be excellent baits for catching stripers that are hanging around deep structure.

In the summertime, it's almost impossible to keep shad alive for more than a few minutes. Striper guides on Texoma and striper fishermen at Lake Keystone install elaborate bait tanks and mix ice, salt and chemicals to make a suitable environment for their fragile baits to swim in until needed. But in the winter, when water and air temperatures are colder, it's possible to keep shad alive in a regular livewell or even in a bucket outfitted with a small battery-powered aerator. You may not be able to keep the shad alive for days, but a lifespan of some hours is feasible. And live, swimming shad are infinitely better than dead or cut shad -- at least when you're fishing for stripers or white/striped bass hybrids: If your shad die, you might as well switch to catfishing.