My perch journal.

[esoxlucius]

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.

 

[cockroach]

Following this. with enthusiasm. Your tank actually introduced me to the beauty if these fish.

I missing angling.
And when I say miss it, I don't mean I haven't had a chance.
I mean I sit some evenings imagining what it was like on the rivers and lakes. I have done fake casts into my tanks and all.

I am not a ocean angler and the freshwater angling here is a little more than we would do for bait fish or gave the kids reed fishing rods and a float to fish with. I had a chance to go bass fishing last year and managed to catch skinny bass as it was winter. I have caught that fish in my mind about 20 times again. LOL

 

[esoxlucius]

Following this. with enthusiasm. Your tank actually introduced me to the beauty if these fish.

I must say, since I introduced my perch to my 360 I have a real itch to get back into fishing. They've rekindled memories of yesteryear. I left my angling past many many years ago but my perch pb was only 1lb 8oz caught in the 1980's, and I am now on a mission to improve on that. I have unfinished business!

My research thus far has pinpointed several large perch waters but a lot of them are huge reservoirs. Very large featureless waters do nothing for me whatsoever. It'd be like looking for needles in haystacks.

I prefer small compact waters with weed beds and lily pads, bushes encroaching onto the margins and overhanging tree branches almost touching the water. All very perchy! And the water I was fishing the other day has all these attributes, and is proven to contain big fish. Every single box is ticked with this new water.

I am very very confident that, in time, I will easily smash my current pb, and probably carry on smashing each subsequent pb after that. Perch of 3lb are not uncommon on this water and maybe a couple of times a year a true monster of over 4lb will show. The rumours of fish around the 5lb mark have been circulating but I think these could be lofty fisherman tales!

My ultimate dream would be to catch one of these 5lb leviathans and then I could sign off on this thread with the words....."my work is done here."

 

[danotaylor]

As a fisho myself, I’m looking forward to tracking your progress mate
A mate took me out on Lake Erie soon after we moved to Ohio from Australia. No monsters were caught, but a very nice feed of 9-13 inchers. Having never eaten perch before, I was delighted with the texture and flavor Are the waters you’re fishing catch & release, or can you take a feed of perch from them?

 

[esoxlucius]

Are the waters you’re fishing catch & release, or can you take a feed of perch from them?

Every single club or commercial coarse fishery in the UK is strictly catch and release. I do not know of any single fishery that has a policy of take whatever fish you want and do with it whatever you want, whether it's for eating or taxidermy purposes. Of course trout and salmon fisheries are different but we're talking coarse fish here.

Waters which are not governed by any club or commercial enterprise and can be fished free of charge, well you can do what the hell you want on them, though these type of waters tend to be sparsely populated because there are no regular stocking programmes to ensure they're crammed full of fish. So you tend not to get serious anglers fishing these type of venues anyway.

Even if you could keep what you caught there would be no way on this earth I would catch a quality perch and just kill it. Not a chance, ever. I have eaten perch in the past but that was just out of curiosity. Years and years ago I took some small fish home once which died in my keep net.

And they are indeed delicious eating.

 

[jjohnwm]

I've gotta admit, those Euro-Perch certainly are a lot bigger than ours over here. And I admire the fact that most of the fishing is live-release, even though on this side of the pond Perch are considered panfish, meaning just what it sounds like, i.e. fish fit for the frying pan. Perch, along with their larger cousins Walleye and Sauger (I think your equivalent is Zander?) are my absolute favourite eating fish. Even so, I'll never keep more than enough for a single good meal, and I will never keep a true prime breeder Jumbo Perch or large specimen of any species. No idea what my PB Perch would be, but I've certainly never caught one larger than 12 inches, with the vast majority being in the single-digit range.

I shudder when I think of the crowds literally lining the shores of good fishing spots of my youth during the much-anticipated spring spawning run of Perch. Literally everybody had a five-gallon bucket which they were filling with fish to take home. Most of us were fishing with live bait, using double or triple "spreaders" and often pulling in 2 and 3 fish at a time. Releasing fish alive? Who would do such a thing?!?

We have some small stocked pay-to-fish operations here in Canuckistan, but they are few and far between. Very few people do that here; I considered using one of them when my oldest granddaughter was very young and I wanted her to be successful but I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea of paying to fish. There was even one in my neck of the woods in Ontario that was full of stocked trout, the obese fin-clipped hatchery fish that look like the piscine equivalent of Butterball turkeys. If I recall correctly, they required you to use the bait they sold...which was essentially Trout Chow. I didn't want her to start her fishing career on those. She's now an accomplished angler in her own right, and takes her 4-year-old daughter whenever she goes.

How'd you come to move away from fishing, Esox? I still love it and can't imagine giving it up. And are you still planning on taking down the Perch tank in the near future as you originally described?