Finding perch requires persistence

[Spiel]

Finding perch requires persistence

 

Updated: 05/04/08 6:46 AM

Will Elliott / buffalonews.com

 

 

A couple dozen plump perch make a Lake Erie outing most rewarding.

Lake Erie remains a fish factory for gigantic jumbo perch, but finding and catching these remarkable ringbacks is no longer your father’s, or grandpa’s, ringback roundup.

 

Through the 1950s and well into the ’60s finding schools of yellow perch was a snap, especially at this time of year. In April and early May, perch would move into the shallows all along Erie’s New York State shoreline. Anglers need not travel far for both bait and for brimming bucket catches of theses tasty fish.

 

Most outings took more time for scaling and filleting fish than finding, catching and bringing them home. As a kid I spent much of my youth chasing these perch schools after school many an afternoon and evening. We could seine net a bucket of bait from the shallows protected by Point Breeze and be on the water and over fish less than an hour after classes at Lake Shore Central.

 

Getting to these fish was simple. On calm days, boaters could row out to depths of five to 10 feet, anchor and expect to hit into pre-spawning perch as they cruised into shoreline shallows. Perch, basically daylight feeders, would turn off their feed sometime just before sunset. One reliable indicator of the shutdown most evenings was the start of the bullhead and small catfish bite.

 

Into summer and even after school started in September, boaters would chase those schools of post-spawn perch to depths anywhere from 25 feet out to the “shipping lanes” along the International Line. They would head out of popular access sites at Hamburg, Sturgeon Point, Point Breeze, Cattaraugus Creek and Dunkirk Harbor.

 

Boaters usually fished in 12-to 16- foot hulls with outboard motors rarely driven by 25 horses. Without sonar — the Lowrance “green boxes” began showing everywhere in the late ’60s — the use of underwater contour maps and GPS, anglers would simply look for a flotilla of fishermen, anchor just out of casting range, drop a line to the bottom and start reeling in the ringbacks.

 

Today, all those launch sites can be hot perch spots and perch schools are still in session at sites from Buffalo to Barcelona, but so much has changed in modern, perch-fishing times.

 

Filtration from exotic mussels that began in the ’90s resulted in greater water clarity, which puts schools of perch on spawning beds in deeper waters well off shore. Fishing pressures — and a host of other factors — have reduced overall numbers of fish, but, when they can be found, perch provide a respectable fight on lighter tackle. And, of course, they render what most fishers would consider the finest of panfish fillets that can be caught.

 

That’s what longtime fishing partner Ken “Mach” Maciejewski and I attempted to do on April 25. While calling to find where the fish are biting for the Fishing Line update on Wednesday, I was told by Ricky Miller at Miller’s Bait & Tackle in Irving: “The perch are hitting off Evangola in about 51 feet.”

 

We decided to give it a try on Friday afternoon. After a morning of house chores, during which the wind started kicking up, I met Mach and we headed for the Catt.

 

Ricky supplied us with a bucket of live fatheads and a bag of salted emerald shiners, saying, “The guys tell me that [perch] sometimes hit better on emeralds.” He was right. But it took some reconnaissance running and repeated depth and structure checking for more than two hours before we felt the first perch bite.

 

As we headed out of the creek mouth, expecting to buck waves and drop heavy anchors, we were met with an unusual event for afternoon fishing on Lake Erie. The winds died and the lake was almost pond calm with just slight swells from those morning gusts.

 

A couple of bass boaters worked Eagle Bay rock piles at 25-foot depths west of the creek. A couple more boats appeared over deeper waters and barely visible eastward toward Evangola State Park and Point Breeze. None of the reliable humps and drop-offs on either side of Foxes Point had an anchored boater on site.

 

A check with sonar and four or five nearly stationary drifts resulted in neither fish on the screen nor biting on our baits. Finally, one boater just east of Evangola remained in place over a nice school of perch.

 

We anchored near him and the hits started immediately. In minutes, boats appeared from the east and west and six boats had anchors set within 100 yards of each other.

 

How these boaters arrived, how perch began hitting and how they ended up as filleting fare will be the subject of next Sunday’s column.