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Tubin' Yuba Lake 9-27-06
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[cool][font "Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"][black][size 1][#0000ff]TubeBabe and I hit Yuba yesterday. Launched our tubes from the main ramp about 7:30. Air temp 35, water temp 59. Clear skies and light breeze that eventually stopped completely and the lake became glass for most of the day.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]We started fishing the gravel shoreline west toward the dam. I was throwing 3" swimbaits in several colors and perch colored long crankbaits, trying for pike. She was mainly throwing spinners for trout. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Neither of us caught any trout...all day...but we did catch perch. Boy howdy did we catch perch. We couldn't find anyplace around the lake that they were not abundant. Nor could we find any lure they would not hit. There were few casts we made in less than 15 feet of water that did not result in either a perch, a double on perch or at least several hits on the retrieve.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]In the attached pics, I am including closeups of several perch I got on a variety of different lures. I kept fishing for pike, with plastics and hardbaits, and for trout, using spinners. But, other than one "bite-off" from a pike, neither of us had any action on any fish other than perch.[/#0000ff]

[#0000ff]There were only a few very small trout smacking the surface. No larger ones and none that wanted to dine on our spinners. After the first hour or so, TubeBabe went with the flow. She gave up on fishing for the no-show trout and rigged a tandem tube jig rig for perch. The rest of the day it was constant singles and doubles for her.[/#0000ff]

[#0000ff]I fished all along the dam and over to the south side shoreline, where the exposed rocky rubble goes down into the lake. The lake has dropped about 20 feet from high water. There was about a foot of water under the bridge and my favorite structure on the south side was mostly out of water. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]That didn't bother the perch. Everytime I cast a lure to the shore it was promptly smacked. For awhile, I put away my larger stuff and threw some small jigs at those aggressive perch. Caught a grundle, but average was from 7" to 9". Also caught a few about 5"-6". [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Saw lots of smaller ones in some spots, but no fathead minnows. It would seem that the baby perch are becoming the food base for the bigger perch. Some of the larger ones I caught spit up perch minnows as I brought them to the tube.[/#0000ff]

[#0000ff]About 11 AM, TubeBabe and I agreed (by walkie talkie) that we should probably take out and go over to Painted Rocks, just to see if there was something besides perch to catch. She began to work back along the shoreline, from where she had been fishing by the bridge. I took a straight line from the south shoreline toward the ramp. [/#0000ff]

[#0000ff]As I kicked out into deeper water I was amazed at what I saw on sonar. From 51 feet to the deepest spot I saw (57 feet) fish were stacked over the bottom. The average depth for most of the way across was about 53 feet, and there were fish from the bottom up to about 40 feet almost the entire kick back to the other side. I guessed that they were probably trout and big perch, waiting for the water to cool a few more degrees before heading back to the surface and the shoreline. [/#0000ff]

[#0000ff]Since I had neglected to screw any downriggers to my tube, I did not work the deep fish. Instead, I threw out a spinner and maintained a moderate kick rate to troll across the lake while eating my sandwich. Stupid perch wouldn't give me any peace out there in deep water either. Caught a couple of perch almost on top in over 50 feet of water. A couple of the boats trolling for trout had the same complaint. They had not caught any trout but had caught lots of perch.[/#0000ff]

[#0000ff]Ate a couple of slices of cold pizza back at the car and we headed for Painted Rocks. The lake was still glass and there was not another soul in sight when we got there. Lovely. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Hit the water from the gravel beach just after 1 PM and fished until about 4. The water temp was the same 63 we had left behind at the dam. No surface action here either, except for some tiny trout. Birds were diving on them in several spots.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]TubeBabe went west to the island and I went east, along the gravel beach, again throwing large plastics and hardbaits next to visible stickups, still trying for a pike. Still couldn't get my lures through the aggressive perch, so I gave up and started fishing just for perch...hoping some other misguided fish might take my offerings. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]TubeBabe and I were talking on the walkie talkie and she reported finding huge schools of nice sized perch around the island, taking quite a few in the 10 inch range. During one stretch she caught at least 40 or 50 doubles, with both fish being good sized.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Once I began focusing on perch, I caught a grundle too, but only a few doubles on my tandem rig. But, I had several sessions in which I was dropping straight down and lifting one or two perch back up at the rate of several per minute.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]I caught both my smallest and my largest perch late in the day. The smallest was barely 5" and the largest I got to the tube was just over 11". I did have a couple of larger ones that did the standard open-mouth "perch shake" at the top of the water and gave me my jig back so that I wouldn't have to handle them and add to my "perch rash" on my hands.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]I mentioned that several of the perch spit up small perch fry. One of the surprises of the day was when I grasped an average 9 incher and a minnow head popped out of its mouth. Only this minnow was a small trout. Apparently there has been a recent plant of trout fingerlings. The birds were having a great time with them...grebes, gulls and pelicans...and apparently the perch were finding them acceptable too. I am attaching two pics (TROUT DINNER) showing the ingested troutling.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]I usually don't get hung up on fish counts. We have no way of knowing how many perch we actually caught, but our best estimates are that I probably caught over 150 and TubeBabe probably caught at least a hundred more. She fished them for fun on her light rod and was constantly into them. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]That means that between us we conservatively caught over 400 perch. I think it is safe to say that the perch population of Yuba is well established. We fished hundreds of yards of shoreline, at both ends of the lake, and we found hordes of perch everywhere we went. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Now, if the water cools down to about 50-55, maybe the trout will come out to play again. It will be interesting to see if the perch have decimated the fathead minnows to the point that they impact the growth rate of the rainbows. All of the big bows last year were stuffed with fatheads. This year we can't find any concentrations of the minnows so we will have to see whether the trout have found them...or an acceptable substitute.[/#0000ff] [/size][/black][/font]
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[font "Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"][black][size 1][#ff0000]PS. For those who do not live in Utah, and who do not know about Yuba, there is a current restriction about keeping perch. The lake is two years into a recovery program after it was drained for repairs on the dam. All fish were released.[/#ff0000]

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Tubin' Yuba Lake 9-27-06 - by TubeDude - 09-28-2006, 12:30 PM

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