We did it, a planned fishing trip. Being that the freezer was void of perch fillets we planned a fishing trip to rectify the situation. We decided to hit Lake Washington early Sunday morning; fish cuts for a few hours and then focus on loading the cooler with perch. Plan almost waylaid but the only causality was my shot at the cutthroat. I got up at 3:30 and then made the mistake of turning my work computer on. Of course it was just to check on things but 3 or 4 hours later… Distraction resolved I got busy with the important stuff and hooked the boat up in anticipation of a perch-a-pallusa. By 7:00-8:00 or so we were we were heading south towards the big lake. I had planned to launch at Atlantic City and explore the south end of the lake but we were already burning daylight so we launched on the Sammamish River in Kenmore. Once we motored out onto the lake we kicked her up and headed for the Kirkland area.

Just south of Juanita Bay we shut down and broke out the cutthroat gear. I got to make 1 pass on the Kirkland waterfront before we got busy looking for perch. We blanked out on the cutts but after popping a downrigger clip I did retrieve a shredded green cut-plug herring. Time for perch, I have a general familiarity with Lake Washington fisheries but G-Man had shared a bit of his local knowledge so our learning curve was a short one. We metered around off Yarrow Point in 15’-30’ of water looking for schools of fish or hard edges on the weed beds. On locating a likely area we would test fish it drifting to determine size or if anybody was home. If all was good we would set the anchor and get down to business. As it turned out after a couple different test drifts we anchored over the perch mother load. Over the next couple of hours we caught hundreds of perch releasing all but the 8-12 inchers. We were fishing a butterfly rigged jig (G-Man and I must be like minded) baited with a chunk of night crawler or perch meat. We started out fishing the jig with a drop shot hook above but went to just the jig. Interestingly on Sunday a blue jig had a definite edge over any other color we fished.

Although the big fish bite would come and go we had fish going from the moment we dropped anchor. We ended up keeping exactly 100 8” – 12” perch (98 + 2 for bait) releasing at least that many. We also hooked and released a number of other fish including small mouth bass, largemouth bass, rock bass, crappie and a few others where I was not sure about the ID. The day was a blast and after the long ride/drive home it only took about 1 ½ hours to fillet our bounty.

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