By Steve Weisman
(photo by Steve Weisman) The author’s son with a 12-inch perch taken on Big Spirit this past week.
When my son, Curt said he had a couple of days off and wanted to take me fishing, you can be sure I said, “You bet!” It’s not every day that I get that kind of invitation. The plan was to fish Big Spirit and see what kind of perch action we could find. As is often the case when it comes to fishing, no two days are alike.
I will tell you this. We wanted to fish mornings, so that meant meeting at the boat ramp at about 8 a.m. Let me tell you 30 degree temperatures definitely require extra clothing and some light gloves. The fishing report we had was that the west side from Marble Beach past Buffalo Run had been the best, either in the weeds in 7’-8’ of water or out deeper anywhere from 15’-18’ of water.
The first day we tried shallow in front of Buffalo Run with little success. We then slowly motored our way south toward Marble Beach with Curt watching his sonar for schools of fish. We only saw scattered fish until we got about 200 yards north of Marble Beach, when the lower half of the screen filled up with fish. We were in about 9’ of water with scattered weeds. We used yellow/white mini jigs and Shuck’s Jigger Minnows (green/gold, red/silver, purple/silver) tipped with either silver wigglers or medium sized minnows.
We immediately had action, but most of the perch were smaller-6-8 inchers. We probably caught 40 or so over a couple of hours, but only eight were pushing the 9-inch minimum we were looking for. After tiring of the pesky little perch, Curt motored out to the southwest into 16’ of water with intermittent rocks on the bottom.
We ended up catching an additional dozen perch between 9-10 inches. Again, there was no clearly defined best bait. It was again a matter of sorting through another bunch of little ones to get our keepers.
By noon, we had 20 perch and headed in.
The next day the wind was out of the southeast and was supposed to get up to 10-20 mph, so we used the spillway boat ramp. However, we still wanted to fish the west side of the lake, so Curt boated out to the spot we ended up on the first day. After motoring around in search mode, Curt headed along the rocks in 15-16’ of water when the screen suddenly lit up with several feet of perch.
Initially, we caught a lot of 7-8 ½ inchers on both the mini jig and a Jigger Minnow tipped with silver wigglers or a minnow. Then around 9:30, the big perch went on a bite, but only on either a green/gold or purple/silver Jigger Minnow tipped with a minnow. For the next two hours, we probably caught 100 perch ranging from 8 to 12 inches in length. By 11:30, we had 38 perch between 9-12 inches. We knew it was a good perch, when they grabbed the minnow and the rod tip bent down-no nibble, nibble, nibble. Instead, it was watch the rod tip bend and set the hook! Most of the time the perch took the bait as we lifted the Jigger Minnow off the bottom.
We did find when we cleaned the fish that the perch in the weeds were full of tiny bluegills (flats), while the deeper perch were eating blood worms off the bottom.
Each day is different, but there are some nice perch to be had on Big Spirit. Water temperature was still in the mid-40s and if you dress for the cool weather, it’s a lot of fun. The first day we saw maybe 10-15 boats on the water, but the second day we were totally by ourselves. Of course, two-foot waves and upper 30-degree temperatures can do that!
I really think this bite will continue as long as we can brave the temperatures.
