Thread: Perch are back

Been a while since I fished the upper end of Murray so today I went with one of my fishing buddies, Harry. We put in down the lake at SCE&G #4 since I knew it was out close to the river and with the lake down, I was not sure which ramps were usable. There was a lot of boat traffic in the river, most fishing for Stripers. After fighting the waves from all the boats for a while we decided to run up to our old haunt at Clouds Creek. Turns out the ramp there is fine and should handle most rigs. We were seeing gulls all over and some fishermen but we did not see anyone catching Stripers. After watching a flock of gulls picking minnows off the surface and no one hooking up I told Harry I thought it was White Perch running the minnows up. So we eased into the area with minnows down on about 7 rods. That is when it went crazy. Harry had one on, then two and when the third rod went down I went back to help only to see two of mine go down. Apparently we had drifted into a large school because I set the anchor lock on the I-Pilot and we caught fish like crazy until we ran out of minnows(72) Here are a couple of shots of us, Harry with one of several doubles until we started using just one minnow on each rod. Also Butch's cooler shot. We ended up with 50 decent ones for the pot and maybe a few crappie eggs spared by removing these guys. Unfortunately. they were almost all full of eggs so there are more on the way.