I hardly participate any longer in forum activity but for those who know me pretty well from my past will be aware that I have a real soft spot for the European Perch. To such an extent that my once tropical 360g tank is now a cold water perch tank.
I was also once a keen angler, though hardly go nowadays, but I thought it was time to come out of angling retirement and get on that saddle again.
Back in my angling days my biggest perch was only around the 1lb 8oz mark, small really when a lot of choice fisheries nowadays in the UK have fish pushing 6lb in them!!
So a plan began to hatch in my head. That is to do some research on local waters to me that have good heads of quality perch in them. My goal over the course of this thread is to log my angling trips and subsequent catches. Hopefully along the way I'll not only better my current pb, but I'll continue to set new ones too. My dream is to eventually catch a right clonker of a perch, and you guys will be with me as my perchy journey unfolds.
I've already found one extremely promising water about an hour's drive from where I live. It's a club fishery with three lodges and all three have perch in them up to 4lb, some reports have also suggested they could even break the 5lb mark. This is music to my ears, so I went over there yesterday for the first time to try my luck!
Perch are well known to be low light feeders, dawn and dusk are the best times to go perch fishing. I started fishing at 14:15 and planned to fish till the light was well and truly fading, which currently is around 18:00 in the UK at this time of the year.
It was slow fishing but I managed to catch around 12 perch of varying sizes. The three biggest were over 1lb, see picture below of the biggest at 1lb 4oz.
The 12 fish I had were nice but the thing that really excited me though was the very last bite I had. The light was fading fast and my float slowly bobbed and went under. I struck into it and straight away I could tell it was a good fish, and it had the unmistakeable head shake of a perch. It went on a crazy first run but my clutch on the real wasn't set right and as a result it snapped off, and boy did it feel heavy!
I was gutted but couldn't dwell on it too much. I now know the potential of a pb, many future pb's even, from this water, is high. And I can't wait to come again.
I was also once a keen angler, though hardly go nowadays, but I thought it was time to come out of angling retirement and get on that saddle again.
Back in my angling days my biggest perch was only around the 1lb 8oz mark, small really when a lot of choice fisheries nowadays in the UK have fish pushing 6lb in them!!
So a plan began to hatch in my head. That is to do some research on local waters to me that have good heads of quality perch in them. My goal over the course of this thread is to log my angling trips and subsequent catches. Hopefully along the way I'll not only better my current pb, but I'll continue to set new ones too. My dream is to eventually catch a right clonker of a perch, and you guys will be with me as my perchy journey unfolds.
I've already found one extremely promising water about an hour's drive from where I live. It's a club fishery with three lodges and all three have perch in them up to 4lb, some reports have also suggested they could even break the 5lb mark. This is music to my ears, so I went over there yesterday for the first time to try my luck!
Perch are well known to be low light feeders, dawn and dusk are the best times to go perch fishing. I started fishing at 14:15 and planned to fish till the light was well and truly fading, which currently is around 18:00 in the UK at this time of the year.
It was slow fishing but I managed to catch around 12 perch of varying sizes. The three biggest were over 1lb, see picture below of the biggest at 1lb 4oz.
The 12 fish I had were nice but the thing that really excited me though was the very last bite I had. The light was fading fast and my float slowly bobbed and went under. I struck into it and straight away I could tell it was a good fish, and it had the unmistakeable head shake of a perch. It went on a crazy first run but my clutch on the real wasn't set right and as a result it snapped off, and boy did it feel heavy!
I was gutted but couldn't dwell on it too much. I now know the potential of a pb, many future pb's even, from this water, is high. And I can't wait to come again.
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