A little perchin'

One of the benefits of living near Lake Erie is the excellent fishing opportunities. The lake is loaded with smallmouth bass, walleye, and yellow perch.

As the water warms up, the perch begin to congregate in HUGE schools, and can easily be found with a fish finder, or you can just go find the hundred or so boats (we call it the "perch pack") all anchored in the same place!

This past weekend, I met up with Chris, Steve, and Greg and we headed out in hopes of filling a cooler with perch. The bite has been hot and heavy lately and we knew where to look for them.

After meeting up at Chris' house to load up his truck and get the boat, we headed to the bait shop and launch. With 8 dozen emerald shiners in buckets, we launched and headed out onto the lake.

Upon reaching the perch pack, and seeing the size of the swells, I knew I should've taken some motion sickness medication, but it was too late, I'd just have to tough it out as long as possible.

Once a good clump of fish showed up on the fish finder, we dropped the anchor, baited up our crappie rigs (allowing us to catch doubles and triples) and dropped them to the bottom.

It wasn't long and fish were filling the cooler! We were mostly catching singles, but every now and then we'd get a double and Chris managed to hook a triple as shown in the picture!

Most of the fish weren't huge, they averaged in the 10" range, like the one Greg is holding in pic #3, but several that were more than 12" were caught as well.

(Steve is landing a fat little lunker in this picture->).

As the morning wore on, the bite became sporadic; at times all 4 of us would have fish on as soon as our baits hit the floor of the lake, and at others we'd all be thwiddling our thumbs waiting for the next wave of fish to feed through. When the fish were there though, the action was fast and furious!

Speaking of waves, the constant rollers were making me nauseous and I knew I wasn't going to last a whole lot longer. Earlier, I'd thought about taking motion sickness medication, but elected not too as the forecast hadn't been that bad. (I should have as although I never actually got sick, it did cut our day short.)

Seeing a boat whose captain Chris and Steve knew, we hailed them on the radio and brought them over to our location to enjoy the bite. Our cooler was filling up and we expected to limit out shortly. They pulled up along side of us to the north and were immediately into the fish as well.

Unfortunately, shortly after they arrived, the bite began to slow down, and after a count of the fish in the cooler, we found out we had punched 3 tickets, and although we could've stuck it out and tried to get our last 30 fish, we decided to call it an outing and head in. 90 fish is just about as many as anyone would want to clean anyways!