Echo Perch Jerkin' 8-4-20

[TubeDude]

Me and Lee assaulted Echo this morning.  Launched about 6:30 and headed south to the brushy point about a quarter mile from the ramp.   Air temp was a lovely 53 and water temps a comfy 72.

Didn't see much on sonar moving in and out on the way to our chosen spot.  But when we got to the flooded brush the sonar lit up and so did the perch.  Pretty much a non-stop perchfest until we both had all the fun we could stand and had more perch than we wanted to clean.

The first biters were kinda tentative and would really take only very small jigs with a small piece of crawler.  But as the sun got higher the fish got more active  and I upgraded to larger jigs and a piece of perch meat.  That, and fishing in slightly deeper water, got me fewer but larger perch.  The six and seven inchers swarmed us in 8-10 feet of water.  But the bigger fish seemed to be about 12-14 feet.  I kept only a few 7 inchers, a bunch of 8 inchers and plenty of 9-10 inchers that gave up decent fillets.  The smaller models were our original targets...as bait for tipping fligs in a couple of other waters.  But we were happy to bring in some table sized fish too.  In fact, I lost several at the tube that might have been legitimate footlongs.  Either inexperienced and did not know how to hang on...or they had paid attention in school and learned how to give back anglers' jigs effectively.

At any rate, the lake was flat glass most of the morning...with one 15 minute minor ripple from the south.  Boat traffic was light until we were departing about 11.  Then it started getting noisy.  Why do boaters need to scream everything...just for the benefit of us quiet tuber types?  Loud engine noises must adversely affect their hearing.

Ended up with a nice pile of skinless, boneless fillets for the table...and a good sized bag of scaled, skin-on fillets from the smaller fish to package and freeze for many future fliggin' trips.

A couple of notes:  The lake is down a bit from where it was last year at this time.  Not many places where shoreline brush comes down into the lake.  That's the stuff that is holding the young-of-the-year perchlets...upon which larger perch and a lot of smallmouth bass are chowing down.  Also noticed the remnants of a crawdad in the gullet of one of the smallies who intercepted a perch jig.