A Dearth of Perch
Published: Tuesday, September 22, 2020
By: Dan Armitage
In a typical season, yellow perch net more than their share of attention from Great Lakes anglers about this time of year. The popular panfish school up to feed as waters cool and when fishermen find the concentrations, the perch are pushovers for shiners dropped among the bottom-hugging school.
Among fish and man, 2020 has been anything but typical, and in some areas of the Great Lakes the yellow perch have been virtual no shows at their usual late summer schooling depths and grounds for the second season in a row. Biologists claim the perch are there, but say their food sources have shifted from shiners to invertebrates. That shift has the perch feeding higher in the water column and not nearly as likely to be relating to the bottom, where they traditionally have fed on baitfish and made themselves vulnerable to any angler armed with a perch spreader, a sinker, and a bucket of shiners.
That’s not to say traditional “perch-jerking” methods won’t work this season; it just may take more work on the angler’s part to find the fish and get them interesting in eating whatever bait is aboard—from shiners and minnows to red worms and nightcrawler chunks.
When I need to bring the fish to me and get them feeding, I often turn to using chum. It’s a tactic I picked up when I lived in the Florida Keys and commercially fished with rods and reels for a summer. My target species was yellowtail snapper, and the method involved anchoring the boat on the outside of the reef and thawing net bags of frozen ground fish and oils over the side.
I tossed chunks of cut fish in the slick every few minutes to attract the heartier eaters. The chum would soon attract baitfish and then the snapper that followed, and it was a matter of drifting hooked chunks of cut fish into the feeding frenzy to catch my share of snapper—and the occasional grouper or cobia that crashed the party.
One of the first such chumming experiences I witnessed in freshwater when I moved back to the Midwest came on Lake Erie aboard a charter boat. We were sitting in 33 feet of water over a big school of perch that had lockjaw. The captain got tired of the inactivity, and said “All right, everybody. Put as many shiners as you can, dead or alive, on every hook, lower them to bottom, and jerk hard to shake them loose.” It did the trick. The sudden appearance of a “school” of baitfish fired the perch up, ushered in a feeding frenzy, and we limited out.
Similarly, I have since talked to perch anglers who puncture cans of cheap cat food and tie them to their anchors before lowering the Danforths to the perch grounds below, where the fishy contents ooze out and attract baitfish and perch alike. Others have secret concoctions of ground fish and pet food and oils like anise that they blend and freeze in Solo cups to make perch-attracting popsicles that they sink around their boats (sans cups) to keep the fish in the area.
And while not exactly a chumming tactic, I fished aboard a Great Lakes perch charter whose captain fired up the diesel engines when the bite slowed, claiming the fish were attracted to the sound. It worked so well that day that he left the engine idling until we netted our limit and headed back to port.
“Some days you just gotta’ do what it takes to get fish in the boat,” he said on the way back to port. He explained that he stumbled on the running engine tactic when he began noticing that the bite often picked up just before he started the engine to get it warmed up before weighing anchor to make a move.
“It’s saved more than a few perch trips for me, I can tell you that,” he said, adding, “I just can’t tell you why!”
About the Author
Dan Armitage is a popular Great Lakes-based outdoor writer and host of the Buckeye Sportsman show (buckeyesportsman.net), syndicated weekly on 30 radio stations across Ohio. Dan is a certified Passport to Fishing instructor and leads kids fishing programs at Midwest boat and sport shows, and is a licensed Captain with a Master rating from the US Coast Guard.
This article first appeared in the Fall Issue (Sep/Oct) 2020 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
tags: Fishing, Great Lakes
