Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Something about today was different. Neither Carl or I could figure it out, but something was going on that made the perch big and very angry...but I'll get to that later.

Carl and I originally planned to test the waters of Solomons but we made some last minute changes to our plans. We decided to see if the perch were as thick in Spa and Weems Creek as they have been in the Wicomico.

We launched and stopped to fish the condos. Nothing.

Carl suggested we move to Weems before there was a chance for the forecasted storm to move in later in the day. We motored to Weems and pulled up to a tree. I caught a little tiny perch...the type you hope your fishing partner doesn't see you land...but he did.

It was slow for 45 minutes to an hour. No bites. Carl and I both started to get worried.

Then Carl hooked something. It started swimming for the bay so Carl and I thought it must have been a striper. When it surfaced I threw my hands up in disbelief and then ran for the net. It was a big old 11" white perch:



Two casts later, I hooked into an 11 incher of my own!



Woooo!

We kept moving and pulled up to the newly dubbed "Nook" behind an enclosed boat dock adjacent to a shady bang full of overhanging tree branches.

So this is where the perch are hiding!

I wish we had taken more pictures but we were catching perch too fast to stop and pose. We just kept hammering them! And the average size was probably 8 or 9 inches. Carl and I figured we caught maybe 5 "soap" sized fish. The rest were fillet sized! I was using a grub that was slightly larger than Carl's. He put on a perch catching clinic; catching fish after fish after I had already passed through a spot.

The thing that was strange was that we saw big schools of minnows EVERYWHERE. The perch were also SUPER aggressive. We caught a lot of them near the surface at the end of our retrieves and Carl even had one try to hit his lure after he had already pulled it from the water. The perch were also crapping all over the boat as we unhooked them. They had definitely been eating well. We assumed they must have been gorging on minnows and that explained the aggressiveness and high volume of perch poop. One pooped all over my shirt and after complaining about it Carl said "I'd let a perch that big poop on my head." It was that kind of day. We were willing to sacrifice getting pooed on for all those big perch.

We moved to another shady spot near the famous "Tiki Bar" to avoid the blistering sun and kept catching perch. After a short while we went back to the "Nook" to see if it had "reloaded" and caught some more perch, including a bonus yellow perch:



By then I think we had caught most of the perch in the area and the sun was getting high, making it difficult to stay in the shade. We decided to call it a day. Carl said he doesn't remember ever catching so many big perch in such a short period of time. We only fished for 2-2.5 hours!

The day's bounty:





We caught just under 50 perch today. We calculated that the two of us caught 50 jumbo perch in 2.5 hours. Carl, Mo, and I put 75 in the boat last Wednesday on the Wicomico in a FULL DAY. The logical conclusion is that Mo has been slowing our catch rates! Imagine what we could have done without him last week!

Just kidding! Me missed you out there today, Mo!

Last edited by Dominion Dan (Jun-03-10 9:05PM)