Like the other lakes, Richard B. Russell has excellent water quality and a healthy population of forage in the way of gizzard and threadfin shad and blueback herring. But unlike Murray and Hartwell, the lake is not stocked with stripers, said Alfred Mauldin, senior fisheries biologist for Georgia. He said the stripers, which are in the lake, have likely migrated downstream from Hartwell.

Even so, Russell has a thriving population of stripers.

"It's a good place to catch a trophy-sized fish," said Mauldin.

A major benefit to the stripers in Russell, he said, is the fact that the lake has a well-defined thermocline. This is important because during the summer months, stripers like to get in the middle layer of the thermocline, where they can access the cooler water but have available oxygen as well. Mauldin said that in this respect Russell is ideal, since it allows the fish to find water below 70 degrees year 'round and thus reduce the stress of summer.

"We know the lake has excellent habitat," he said.

No one has to tell Joseph Taylor that Russell grows nice stripers and plenty of them. He has caught good-sized stripers and high numbers of the fish.

He usually starts out by putting in at the Pearl Mill Landing in Elberton, then trolls to the bridge located less than 100 yards away. He ties off to the metal girders, turns on his gas generator-powered lights and begins looking on his electronic graph for the presence of shad, which he knows will be coming through this bottleneck eventually. Once he sees the forage's distinctive blip on the screen, he throws out his cast net and proceeds to haul in the blueback herring needed to catch the stripers.

But he often doesn't even have to move from the bridge to catch them.

Knowing that stripers are likely to follow the shad and herring as they move down the lake, he'll often drop a live herring right down beside the boat. He uses a traditional Carolina rig, consisting of an egg sinker placed above a circle hook impaled with a live herring.

"If a striper runs up and nails it, you might want to stay right there for a while," he said. "If it doesn't, you might want to start off working your holes and your points."

Russell isn't nearly as big as the other lakes, but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for with one of the best settings around. Traveling north on the lake, it's easy to get lost in the scenery, especially as there are not likely to be nearly as many boats as there are on other South Carolina lakes. It's unmarred by boat docks, yet still has excellent structure and cover in the way of ditches, brushpiles and blowdowns.

Therefore, it's easy to find a point or hump where stripers are breaking and have it all to yourself. With the fish likely to be both shallow and deep this month, Taylor looks to establish a pattern early. Once the bridge bite slows, he looks for a good point, then anchors his boat in 20 to 25 feet of water and begins throwing out live herring and cut bait on both sides of the boat.

"Mix it up," he said. "Try some of everything."

From there, he'll usually work back into the creeks and begin working the secondary points, or he goes out onto the main lake and tries to catch the fish near humps.

Another great strategy is to find the timber that was, like Hartwell, left standing when the lake was formed. Though Russell has an abundant stand of timber right off the main-river channel, there are also numerous stands of timber 15 feet or more beneath the surface in mouths of tributaries such as Rocky Creek.

Try trolling over these trees with long-billed crankbaits or bucktail jigs. Or if the fish are active near the surface, walking or chugging-type topwater baits, Taylor admits, can elicit some dynamite strikes.

"A lot of times in May, you'll get some good topwater action," he said.

Any one or all three of these lakes will provide the ideal location for catching stripers in May. Whether it's catching them on the Saluda River in Murray, near the points or treetops on Hartwell or at the bridges on Russell, these lakes have something for everyone.