7/26 A Can Perch - Finicky
Hooker had shiners this AM. Lots of pinheads. $5 scoop. Lots in a scoop so 2 scoops looked like plenty generous for 2 of us, since I had other frozen backup. Set up SW of A can about 9 am. First drop 10" perch. Second drop 8"perch. Had a good bite going, with good size, but had trouble keeping the small minnows on and they were stealing fast them as you got it down. To counter that I tried some cut perch bellies and even large frozen shiners on top hooks, but they wanted none of that. I finally got down to one pole and even just one hook and did a little better, but by then bite had slowed some. We had an awful lot of minnows stolen and seems all they wanted today was a whole small pinhead...no large shiners, no cut shiners, no perch bellies. Those caught nothing. And the bite today was hit bottom, lift just a wee bit, you either had one or was cleaned and needed to come up and re bait. Bet 90 percent of bites were on first pickup off bottom. Two minnows to a hook also seemed to hook a higher percentage.
Two of us ended about 12:30 when it got hot (and pinheads ran out) with 35 keepers that went 10 lbs at cleaners. So it was a pretty decent grade of fish, considering we had 4 or 5 gut hooked small ones in there that we kept. Had one 11 3/4 and few throwbacks. And friend fishing with me is not experienced...he fishes maybe once every two or three years. So it wasn't a bad day. Just wish I had sprung for another scoop or two (or some goldies). I think if we had fished one hook, baited two minnows to a hook, early on, or had just a little larger shiners, we could have had two full tickets of nice fish in no time.
