01-26-2022, 09:39 PM
(01-26-2022, 07:47 PM)MrShane Wrote: Hang in there Pat, one of these days we will get three-four years of high water in consecutive years and we will go beat up jumbos again.
Those Perch in the waters you just mentioned are also waiting for high water years.
Not easy living in the bottom few inches of water in a bathtub….
God...give me patience. AND I WANT IT RIGHT NOW!
We of the perch-jerker persuasion suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous weather patterns more than most. Perch need flooded vegetation upon which to spawn...or at least some kind of structure. Ain't much of that on the bottom of drought-dropped manmade lakes. So there is little to no spawning success. That means two things. First, no little ones to grow into big ones. And second, no babies to feed the surviving adults in an ecosystem in which the primary forage for perch is baby perch. Double whammy.
Most of us who pursue perch are aware that big perch eat little perch...almost exclusively during a large part of the growing season. I can recall trips to Yuba, Deer Creek and Starvation in which every large perch caught was barfing up baby perch. And the best bait dujour was putting a freshly barfed perchlet on your jig and sending it back down. Kind of like a perpetual motion machine. So any year in which the water levels at spawning time are too low to provide spawning habitat for perch there will not be a good spawn...and the whole system collapses. That was always a big problem at Yuba...up and down cycles. When it was good it was very good. But the next year might be a bit lean. And declines in perch numbers or quality are almost never the result of angler harvest.