Yellow Perch

rsimms

rsimms

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Nothing special about this. I'm just showing off a pair of yellow perch we (me and partner Bill Swan III) caught on Chickamauga yesterday while trolling for crappie. Crappie are great, but big yellow perch are the icing on the cake! I wish I knew how to specifically target them (on Chickamauga) rather than the occasional random catches. I've targeted them up in the mountain lakes where they are far more plentiful, but have never tried in on the Tennessee River. Anybody else ever tried?

Biggest one was 13.75 inches(well over TARP length, but I've already got a YP TARP :( )

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I fish Chickamauga a lot but only semi-seriously. I've been hoping for years that a perch fishery would develop that I could target but not yet that I know of. I catch 1 or 2 smallish ones every other year at the most
 
rsimms said:
Nothing special about this. I'm just showing off a pair of yellow perch we (me and partner Bill Swan III) caught on Chickamauga yesterday while trolling for crappie. Crappie are great, but big yellow perch are the icing on the cake! I wish I knew how to specifically target them (on Chickamauga) rather than the occasional random catches. I've targeted them up in the mountain lakes where they are far more plentiful, but have never tried in on the Tennessee River. Anybody else ever tried?

Biggest one was 13.75 inches(well over TARP length, but I've already got a YP TARP :( )

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Use to catch them that size in southern Lake Michigan many years ago. Here's a mess from Lake Erie out of Port Clinton Ohio two summers ago. Yellow perch are the best tasting fresh water fish with walleye right behind them.
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We found one bush last year on our trip and every time we went by it we would catch 2-3 of them. We ended up going by it twice each day and had a good mess of them by the time we left. They sit right on the bottom and you can't see them on the livescope, but they come up and hit a minnow hard. We went back by the same bush this year and they were back in it but they were all dinks. We only kept 1. Couldn't tell you anything that set that bush apart… another bush 20' away never had one in it.
 
Forvols said:
I have never caught one of these - or had a chance to eat one. Are YP in upper northeast tn lakes (Boone, PH, Cherokee etc). ?
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I can't say for sure about those lakes, but I bet they are. Yellow perch actually do exceedingly well in mountain lakes such as Parksville, Appalachia, Blue Ridge, etc. One of our guides used to run trips specifically for yellow perch. But now he has switched over to focusing on walleye and crappie a lot closer to home.

He caught them trolling small crank baits but lots of people fish for them with jigs, sometimes tipped with redworms (or just using plain redworms bottom fishing).
 

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