Fishing Michigan

If I learned anything from this weekend, besides honing my perch cleaning skills, its this:  Check your email every night.  That and a way to fine tune a rig.  Why the email, because that was the notice sent out by one of the readers, thanks for the effort Tony. 

Friday, after rewiring some connectors on the trailer,  I ended up going right to bed to wake up for Saturday morning’s start up.  After all, we had nailed some nice sized fish with a really FAT 12 inch kicker that afternoon.  Many of the same reports had came in at the dock.  Not a lot caught, but some nice sized fish caught.

These were the fish from Friday, with just the biggest fish in the pics:

 

 

So on Saturday we picked up our shiners and headed back to the same spot as Friday.  Where there had been lots of boats on Friday in 21 ft of water (in front of the bay), there was only one Saturday near us.  Fishing started slow, then between 9 and 10 it started to kick into gear.  On average the fish were much bigger Saturday,  we would have weighed in 2 eleven inchers and three 10’s.  Around 2 pm it died off with the quieting of the wind.  A majority of the boats were in Ohio waters, what looked like maybe 26 or 27 fow (feet of water).

 

 

As far as fine tuning the rigs,  all these were caught on the 2 hook standard vertical perch rig that I tied up last week.  We only had 2 doubles in 2 days,  and of all the big fish, only one 9 inch came on the top hook.  Next rigs I make, are only going to have the bottom hook hanging slightly above the weight snap.  Eleminate the top hook, and concentrate on one hook only.

Tips:

I had the Avid and Premier Ultra Lights rigged with 5 and 8 lb Power Pro, the combination of the rods and the no stretch line really shined on Saturday.  Drop the weight down, close the bail and lift up till the line went tight.  Slightest anything and set the  hook.  Placed the hooks dead center on the shiners and fatheads.  Didn’t matter which as long as they were alive or still had scales on them for that shine. When the bait started to run out, tipped the hooks with a dead minnow, and then added a small live shiner on the same hook.  Yesterday was a good case of big bait, catches bigger fish. Next time will get a scoop of walleye sized shiners from Matthew’s to test that theory out a bit more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Perch Fishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.