Saturday was the first day that I started popping bladders and it seemed to work. The first few small ones I was tossing right back in and they just floated on the surface, only briefly as the seagulls were just waiting for us to toss one out and they would grab it. I remember reading an article in in-fisherman about popping bass bladders when they stick out, they called it fizzing and claimed there was a study done saying the bass had a better chance of living. They did it with a needle, I just used my hook and I noticed the perch immediately swam back down deep. The trick is to pop the bladder not past the barb. Obvious I know.:)
I started off in that fleet of boats I think when I got out there, there were 2 other boats and when I moved after getting tired of small fish and lots of boats there were 43 boats close to us. I did see another fleet outside the cat, got about 1/2 mile? close to them when we moved and heard on the radio they were doing about the same, lots of small fish.
Just out of curiousity, is this normal to catch so many small ones like this? I'm still kind of new at this, only 2nd year of perch fishing on erie. I'm of the impression that if you are only catching small fish, move and try and locate a school with bigger fish. Or do some people just stay and wait out the smaller fish?
The funny thing is that a lot of those fish I threw back if I was ice fishing on chautaqua I would have kept most of them.