Fishing Forum

just wondering if rockport is a good lake to takemy 7 year old son for some perch fishing on saterday im now to this ice fishing thing so any advice is wellcome


thank justin
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There are perch in Rockport but they are few and far between. We caught a few there last year but don't go there and expect to catch many, it is more of a trout lake in the last few years.
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For reasons beond me [blush]the perch population and sizes of them go up and down.. Bet it has to do with the amount of food available.. Last good season was 2006.. So hopefuly this yr will be better...[fishin]
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thank someone told me years back that it has to do more with water leval like if there is more water for the fry to hide in or somthing he even sed thay would spon more then ones in a high water year dont know if it is true but it would be interesting to see if the water was extra hi in 2004 2005
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Wait for Deer Creek to ice up. Shouldn't be long.
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ya i hope it is soon i live 5 minits from there so i should get out there alot this year but i just moved hear to heber so i still dont know the lake well sins i dont have a boat yet and i im a verry primitiv ice fishermen sins iam to broke to buy all that fansy geer but my hand auger will get lots of use this year
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My twin got the 11.5 inch pig perch last time we were there on Thurs. Hoping it was a sign of good things to come. Bounce your jig on the bottom is all I can say.

Pineview, Starvation, Fish lake and Mantua are good choices.
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[cool][#0000ff]There was a big dieoff of all year classes under the ice at Rockport that winter. Some say it was a virus. Some say it was a lack of food. Some say it was a water chemistry thing. Whatever it was there were bazillions of dead small perch exposed when the ice melted. Hordes of seagulls had a feast for a few days.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Thankfully, plenty of perch survived and have been trying to rebuild the population. There are some good sized fish in there now but the overall population is still only a fraction of what it was the last couple of winters before the big dieoff.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Strangely, the same thing happened on Jordanelle about the same time. The speculation there is that fires in the upstream watershed resulted in lots of ash, fire retardant chemicals and other runoff coming into the lake and wiping out the food supply of the smaller perch. And the very biggest perch had a natural dieoff at the end of their life cycle after spawning . So Jordanelle also went from a lake of perch aplenty to a perch desert. It is also coming back, but slowly.[/#0000ff]
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Funny how in thirty years perch have evolved from "damnit, another stinking perch, throw it on the bank" to where in hell's bathroom can I find some decent perch?" I remember fishing above Charleston Bridge in the back sloughs of the Provo River and catching a perch about 14" long and being sickly dissapointed.
Why have there not been great numbers of huge perch in any Utah waters for over 20 years? What has changed so much? I'm glad I don't care too much. Utah panfishing is pretty much sub-par. Where you find any numbers of perch they are dinks, and as far as 'gills go, it seams the only place with decent bulls you have to deal with fillets full of parasites. Oh well, the trout fishing is great!
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[fishin] as a kid i thought that size and numbers was what fishing was all about i did my best to cach my limit all the time and the easiest way to do that in california is to fish for stocked trout so that is what i did then i started fly fishing and began to pride myself on caching the trout that weren't stocked then it was to catch cutthroat then brookies but all trout even my bigest fish ever a42 lb king salmon is related so a year or two ago i decided that i wanted to catch some non trout species i started with bass and that wasn't hard then white bass and bluegill may no the jorden river led to meny 40 fish days the next target is the perch then walleye then so on and so forth just want to test my self i live in heber so trout is easy to come by with a fly rod and the provo (witch i love to do) and ice fishing is just part of thet growth so i will ask about perch then when i get bored with that i will move to another fish but the most thrilling cach so far was my first brookie (probably because my son caught his first the same day and he still tells me how his was twice the size of mine)
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Years ago hardly anyone was trying to catch the Perch, now look at the ice fisherman..
Look at the numbers of fisherman that hit the lakes where the Perch are said to be in..

And any size of perch that is hooked and landed is killed, Perch grow at about 1 1/2" per year so a 9" or 10" perch is around 5 years old.. How many fisherman and all the other fish that like to eat them they have to dodge just to live that long??
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"Why have there not been great numbers of huge perch in any Utah waters for over 20 years? What has changed so much?"

[cool][#0000ff]As we have reminisced before, perch used to be "trash fish". Nobody deliberately fished for them so they were not harvested as heavily as they are these days. While it is almost impossible to totally decimate a perch population by angler harvest alone it can have an affect on the sizes available.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]From what I have learned, perch only live about 5 years on average. Some in the extreme north may live a few years longer. But few in Utah exceed about six years. In a super food-rich environment (like the OLD Yuba Reservoir) the size would max out about 14 to 15 inches. Most other waters sees them reaching a maximum of about 13 inches...with a footlong being a prize.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]The biggest perch are always females. The males grow slower and do not get as big. They spawn very early in the year...often right after iceout. And one of the problems with perch spawning is that they need vegetation on which to deposit their eggs. They do not make depression nests in the bottom like other species.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]That has created the potential for big population swings. In years with low water at the end of winter there is not enough spawning habitat for the perch to bring off a good spawn. And with no cover for the newly hatched perchlets they are at the mercy of all predators...including other perch. That means poor "recruitment". In this desert state of Utah there are not many years of high water in early spring since most of our perch ponds are subject to big drawdowns for farm use. So good spawns and big year classes are the rarity rather than the rule. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Most of us recall the years-long drought ending about 2004, That took a toll on many waters. But the good spawns of the following years got the populations started on the upswing. Unfortunately, there were some big dieoffs...for whatever reason...and that knocked the heck out of things too.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]The story in Deer Creek is the smallmouth...more than the walleye. Young smallmouths slurp up a high percentage of the newly hatched perchlets each year...far more than the walleyes ever did. The big crash of the perch population in Deer Creek coincided with the introduction of smallies in the 80s. Before then the lake was full of perch...and crawdads. Since then both of those forage species have dropped way off.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]It is no wonder that the larger perch are harder to find. After five years of running the angler gauntlet, and surviving all of the natural predators and diseases, the mega-thousands of perch from a particular year class have been reduced to a few hundred (or thousand) of the largest spawners. Those that survive their last winter (and ice anglers) will spawn and die in the spring.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]The good news - bad news is that there are younger and smaller females that spawn each year too...and a lot more of them. But if none are ever allowed to reach their full size potential that can affect the gene pool...encouraging fish to remain smaller in order to survive and spawn. We all like to catch and keep the big mamas but it may not be in our best interests to do so.[/#0000ff]
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Years ago alot of the lakes that held perch were closed to year round fishing, I remember when they first opened Deer Creek to ice fishing, man we had a ball fishing for the perch. We didn't catch many of the jumbos but plenty of 9 to 11 in. perch to take home. When I first got stationed in Utah in 76 not many people ice fished, hell the bait shops out here didn't even know what the hell a waxie was. I kept bugging them and finally Angler's Inn started selling them, up until then I had my Dad in Wis. send me a batch or two each winter. Holmes Creek was my favorite ice fishing hole, had it pretty much to myself for a few years. Had people come down and watch the family catch gills, crappie and bass thru the ice. They had never seen anyone ice fish. F&G finally ruined that lake by introducing other fish in there for a Community Pond. I guess they took that off that list now. Not even interested in fishing it anymore since they introduced slime rockets and catfish.
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I never ice-fished Holmes Creek during the glory days, but I spent many summers fishing there almost daily because I lived close by. On the north end of the reservoir their used to be a large tree that had fallen into the water. During the bluegill spawn you could walk out onto the tree and pull out tons of fat, hand sized bluegills. Like PACKFAN has stated, as soon as they made it a community pond and started stocking it with bows and catfish, the bass, bluegill, and crappie populations took a huge hit. The reason is simple, a small lake can only hold so many fish. When thousands of trout are dumped into that lake they eat the other fish out of house and home and then end of starving themseleves. Ice fishing there in the past couple years I've mainly caught skinny bows and and occasional bluegill, crappie, or white bass. I really wish they would stop stocking it with trout, but now that it's become so well known that's not likely to happen. Probably the only way I'll get the "good days" of catching monster bass and bluegill would be to make my own private pond.

Good information TubeDude! One thing I would like to add is that last winter the region received heavy snows that built up deep snow cover over the surface of the reservoirs. Many times this can prevent enough light from penetrating the ice and plants in the lakes can die from lack of sunlight. When this happens the rotting vegetation uses up a lot of available oxygen in the water and things go critical. There simply isn't enough oxygen to support all the fish life and you get a "winter kill" die off of fish. Fortunately most times some fish survive to repopulate the lake if they are lake spawners. Pure science in spite of all the wild rumors.

DeeCee
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Even back as far as 1972 we had a few lakes that had year round fishing, Utah lake, Yuba and two others but I'm not sure of them now..

There was a few of us that fished Yuba in the middle to late 70's for the Perch and would not see another person on the ice till the 80's...
By around 1982 to 1984 the people started to showing up..
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It's a shame that happened to all those 14" perch a few years back at Mud Lake.

I thought that with the delisting of Holmes as a CP the stocking would stop. But looking at the stocking reports, I see Holmes Creek Res being dumped with trout through the spring/summer. No cats.

Is there another Holmes, or have they 'forgotten' not to keep the slimers from falling in?

As for catching perch - I don't know why Utah didn't appreciate perch until recently. We used to fish for perch on Lake Michigan when I was a kid - and we're talking more than 30 years ago. And they were some GOOOD perch!

Willard and Mantua were a couple open to year round when I got here and I think Starvation was another one. I actually drove on the ice at Willard's South Marina back in 76 or 77 with my 1972 Ford Bronco.
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We had a cut down ford PU that we took on the ice at Yuba back in the day..
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