Michigan’s Lake Erie perching remains fantastic

The problem with October is there isn’t enough of it. It’s all happening in October. Climb up in a treestand, set decoys, run your bird dogs… so many choices, so little time.

And fishing? The water temperature is dropping, the walleyes are heading shallower, the bass have strapped on the feedbag, the steelhead are entering the rivers… how do you know what you do?

I recently spent a morning on Lake Erie chasing perch, which is always a viable option in October. I wasn’t at all disappointed.

Shea Hegedus, who skippers Harvest Time, a 32-foot Wellcraft, invited me to join him and four buddies for a half day. Hegedus motored out of Toledo Beach Marina to 13 feet of water, cut the throttle, watched the sonar for a minute or so, and dropped anchor. Over the next three and half hours we put 140 perch in the ice chest. The fishing ranged from one here and one there to rat-a-tat-tat. With the usual by-catch of white perch, sheepshead, and a walleye mixed in, it was rarely slow and at times frantic.

It got me to thinking: Why, with so many of the Great Lakes traditional perch fisheries in the doldrums – look at what’s going on in Saginaw Bay, for instance – does Lake Erie just keep on ticking and never miss a beat?

I called Jim Francis, the Lake Erie Basin coordinator with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and asked, “What gives?”

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Francis says the perch fishing isn’t necessarily as hot lake-wide as it is in the Western Basin, but in the Michigan waters, “Looking at the history of perch fishing back to 1995 when I started, it looks like somebody died. It’s a flat line. We are consistently at 100,000 pounds every year with one outlier – 2016. That year we had 400,000 pounds.

Effort doubled, the catch rate doubled and the harvest quadrupled. We were over our quota.

“We don’t get our creel numbers until January but it looks a lot like 2016,” he said. “We’re not going to get 2016 results, but we are going to be above average. We may be over our quota again.”

What happened in 2016, Francis said, is the perch fishing started a lot earlier in the season than usual. Most years it’s late August or September before it starts going great guns.

“Perch fishing is unique – the fish have to school up for anglers to be efficient on them,” Francis said. “That’s what happened this year.”

Hegedus says the same thing.

“It usually starts in mid-July and you catch 80 to a 100,” he said. “This year it was phenomenal. We were taking 200 to 300 a day for about a three-week span. It slowed down back to around 80 to 100 a day, but it’s heating back up.”

Hegedus – who wasn’t chartering in 2016 – says the only thing that was different this year from the past several that he noticed was there was a lot of east wind this year. He theorized that the east wind pushed colder water from the lake into the Western Basin, causing the fish to school better. But it isn’t just the numbers that are up.

“We’re catching a good grade of fish this year,” he said. “They’re an inch to two inches bigger than they usually are.”

Francis said he’s noticed the same thing. “They’re catching a lot of quality fish and still sorting a lot of fish,” he said. “So the future looks good, too.”

The day I fished with Hegedus it was still shorts and t-shirt weather. I called him about a week or so after we fished – after the temperature dropped and we had several days of cold rain. He told me he was limiting out – 200 to 300 fish – in three to four hours every time he went.

I asked how much longer he was going to be chasing perch this fall and he just sort of chuckled.

“If someone wants to go perch fishing, well, we can go,” he said. “But the walleye fishing is picking back up. They’re not catching the really big fish yet, but the walleye fishing is good. For the most part, we’ll just be walleye fishing from here on out.”

Like I said, that’s the trouble with October: so many choices, so little time.