Cooks Bay perch - Saturday

[Fishnfiend]

I fished Cooks Bay on Saturday with my buddy from about 11 to 5. When we got to the end of 89, we had to park a good kilometre from the ice. Boy, am I glad that he brought his quad. We get to the ice and buy 2 scoops of minnows and head straight out. We didn't bother drilling any test holes as there were huts, people, tracks and vehicles (including trucks) everywhere. There had to be well over 200 huts within eyesight. I had no idea that there was a tourney on until I was reading OOD last night...

 

The wind was absolutely ridiculous out there. We had to park the quad up against the front of the ice hut and put the tow strap around the auger which we half drilled/wedged in the ice. There was about 6-8 inches of good ice out there. Not enough for me to take my truck out, but chacun son gout (to each their own).

 

Initially, we set up 2 tip ups outside the hut, but they proved to be more of a pain than they were benefit. They iced over way too fast. We lifted them and removed the two 'dinks' that were on them and stowed them away for use another day.

 

Then we got serious about fishing with the one line each that we had. Actually, we just waited for a school to come by. The alarm on my portable fish finder started going off...

 

 

Before long we had a decent (9 inch) perch on the ice. As you can see in the previous photo, they were near bottom and hitting on pretty much anything. We tried grubs, minnows and plastics and they ALL worked. The hardest part was waiting for another school to come by. It was tough work, but we did what we had to.

 

 

We ended up taking 36 home. My friend was generous and let me have them all. Here's about half of them:

 

 

No real jumbos, but enough for me to cook a meal for 3. What a ton of work. I forgot how much time it takes to properly clean perch. I had to do this 72 times!

 

 

Not to mention skinning, deboning, etc. Perhaps my friend was as smart as he was nice...

 

Either way, I am going to send him this picture:

 

Edited February 5, 2007 by Fishnfiend

[pikeie]

wow looks like u guys had a good day out there. we were out on sunday and it was tough fishin

[mattyk]

Looks tasty! Perch are a lot of work.

[ccmtcanada]

Awesome report! The cold and wind was just wicked on the weekend. Nice haul you pulled in...and oh yeah....dinner looked tasty too!

[tonyb]

Mmmm great report. Glad to see that you did NOT get into any Jumbos out there either. I thought it was just me

 

I haven't seen too many reports with many Jumbos' like it was last year.

 

Could be a bad year class (Great year class for the smaller fish as there are huge #'s) We'll see how the end of the season turns out, only 5 weeks or so left!

 

Tony

[Uncle Buck]

I don't eat fish, but Dang that looks Good!!

[Fishnfiend]

It was good. I did half the perch in a lemon pepper batter and the other half in onion/garlic/pepper/italian seasoning batter. I am going to have to wait until march before I can get another feed of perch as I am busy for the next month.

 

Have you tried perch recently? Lots of people who don't like fish still eat perch as it isn't 'fishy' like salmon or trout.