7/16 report

We actually perched the last 90 minutes of light on Wednesday at Waterdog's honey hole. We were using shiners on spreaders with no bling. My son landed 2 yellow perch that just barely hit our 8" requirement. Returned one that was too short. My wife lost 3 at the boat. I didn't even get a nibble.
Thursday, we started south of Green before sunrise. We went out in the dark but after sun up we only had a quarter mile of visibility. It looked like fog but it was actually the annual annual forest fire smoke from our friends up north. It burned my throat a little. The smoke would persist all day. You might want to check the smoke forecast before going, especially if you have asthma.
Anyway, my wife and son each landed a couple keeper yellow perch there south of Green while I got nothing again. Only two other boats came to join us before I got too bored with it. It's just too early for perch in my opinion.
So we set up for trolling. This time of year, I would normally go to Lorain and troll deeper water out to the weather buoy and back. That's where the big fish go when the water warms up, right? I would normally use big cranks and big spoons in hopes of catching big walleyes.
But we were at Green, so I decided to try out what I've read in a few posts lately. We trolled a wide circle around Green using little lures. Little spoons, Flicker Shads, and mini Reef Runners. As expected, the trolling was a lot more exciting than the perching. We were constantly pulling up drum and white perch. We also got two little walleyes there - 17" and 18".
Despite all the action, it just wasn't very satisfying to throw back almost all the fish we caught. So we soon pulled up our lines and motored over to Round Reef. My wife and son began perching again, but I put on a crawler harness with a bottom bouncer. I pulled up another drum there, and a pretty big gobie. Maybe 7 inches or so. Big enough to consider for a second how much meat I could get out of it. We got one yellow perch there too.
We didn't last too long before the black flies began to eat us alive. I was happy that all the other bugs seemed to be done for the year, but those black flies were vicious. If you go, be prepared to douse yourself in DEET every hour or so. Even with DEET, we had to drive fast several times to get some relief.
We drove back to Waterdog's honey hole. This morning there were two headboats and two others right there. Could have been more, but we could still only see about a quarter of a mile due to that smoke. I used the same crawler harness while my wife perched. My son tried a Searchbait (to absolutely no avail). None of us had any activity at all there today. We weren't even marking anything.
We didn't stay long. It was hot by then. The breeze was dying down. The flies were awful. So we trolled one last time - in the direction of Catawba. Saw some promising marks here and there but only caught a white perch and a drum. Finally decided to call it a day. When we pulled in the lines, every one had a white perch on it.