Union

Wipers are different...the will "root" and pick bait off the bottom...but my observations while catching them you need the lure or bait up in the strike zone where they can see it...they roam looking for food...I use leeches a lot for wipers and have caught many with them...with one of the pill shaped floats between the weight and the hook suspend the bait up in the strike zone...since I am home sick I loaded up on fishing magazines...here is an interesting excerpt from the Infisherman 2005 Catfish In-Sider magazine on the difference of the feeding habits of Blue Cats versus Stripers (which are half wiper and is how wipers seem to act)...from the magazine:

When I recently visted the Oklahoma Aquarium in tulsa, the contrast in feeding behavior between blues and stripers was striking. I one tank, the state record blue cat - a 98 pound brute--lumbered around the tank in perpetual slow motion and in a predictable circle. Live fish swam under, in front of, over, and in back of the beast, but he ignored them. In the tank next door, a school of 8 pound stripers raced urgently from one end of their tank to the other in a random search pattern--eyes wide open, fins flaring and mouths puffing. A live shad or minnow didnt last 10 seconds with them, but a chunk of dead shad sat on the bottom of the tank until a scavenging turtle found it. The fish curator at the aquarium tells me that the feeding habits of blues and stripers are as different as night and day. The stripers put on a great show, they attack the surface in a frenzy as soon as the feeding starts, and the food seldom makes it to the bottom. So stripers are more aggressive predators with blues as suspending, lurking predators.

I have seen this many times at Aurora...schools of wipers racing up and down the dam searching for food...