I am curious if any of you old time perch jerkers on Lake Erie have irrefutable evidence if chumming brings in more perch than not chumming.

For anyone that's not familiar with what I'm talking about, I was told by an old timer 35+ years ago that the secret for always catching perch is to chum for them. He used canned tuna fish in a mesh bag with a weight to get it down to the bottom. He would get it down to the bottom and give it a couple of jerks to move the tuna fish out of the bag and into the water. When the perch would slow down he would give the bag a couple of jerks to bring them back into the area.

I was to cheap to pay for tuna so I would buy canned catfood, take it out of the can and into a mesh onion bag with some rocks to get it to the bottom. Get it down to the bottom and give it a jerk every now and then. In the past I either used the chum or didn't use it, I never tried to fishing for perch first and if they weren't biting then send down a bag of chum to see if it would bring in the perch. Now logically this would have been a good experiment to know if the chum brought in the perch, but like I said I never tried it this way.

I've struggled to get my limit the past 2 perch trips so I was thinking about doing some chumming the next time out. I'm wondering if any of you fishing experts can tell me that you have proven that chumming brought in fish, or proven that it didn't do anything to bring in fish? The problem is the whole chumming process is a stinky mess that I prefer not doing unless I'm sure it really matters.

So what say you.....does it actually work or not??

Russ