GREAT OUTDOORS: Walleyes snapping away, but lure of perch is strong

As I watch the walleye fishing reports from anglers who are trolling, jigging or trying both to fill their limits, I am not panicking about missing my chance to take some of these prized fish home. There's lots of time to get that checked off my list. Walleyes will remain the primary stars of the show locally in May, June and July before yielding some of the spotlight to yellow perch, if the latter species decides to bite this summer. By then, many of our walleyes are chasing bait in the lake's cooler waters present throughout the Central Basin, and anglers in the Eastern Basin are harassing their own schools off Dunkirk in western New York. Plenty of time and opportunities to catch walleyes remain locally, so when I hear of a great yellow perch bite happening anywhere within a reasonable distance, I do the best I can to join in the fun. Yellow perch is the species that I have my earliest memories of catching with my grandparents and father more than 60 years ago. I was born too late for blue pike fishing, but not too late to be able to reel in way more perch in the early 1960s than we should have kept, which forced us to spend hours cleaning them. I have been watching the weather and the drama that comes with waiting for the New York Power Authority and Ontario Power Generation's ice booms to be removed from where Lake Erie enters the Niagara River. Fishing from small vessels gets underway as soon as navigation is safe from the threat of drifting slush ice and the docks can be installed. This is the time to head to New York's Chautauqua County while the yellow perch school in large numbers close to shore during their spawning period. Perch jerkers are out in good numbers whenever the wind cooperates before New York's walleye season opens May 1. The Sturgeon Point launching ramp parking lot was filled to beyond capacity last week as word got out about recent 50-perch daily limit catches there. I made the drive to Dunkirk, New York, on Tuesday to get an early Wednesday morning start to fishing with Capt. Daryl Glasner for my third straight April trip. After meeting at the Hanover Boat Ramp in Irving, we headed out of Cattaraugus Creek in Sunset Bay where the docks had recently been placed for the 2026 season. After trying numerous historic perch-producing spots saved in Captain Daryl's phone and fish finder unit, I finally got the first bite at 10:45 a.m. The first three perch were about 13 inches long. He commented that I was the new star of the show after a half-dozen boats converged within spitting distance of ours within seconds. Even though there is plenty of room to fish in Sunset Bay, the popularity of "Spot-Lock" trolling motors allows others to crowd in and hover over a spot as soon as someone is seen landing a perch. It is a big contrast from the predictable, loud, expletive-filled opinions that I have often heard in the Western Basin to similar brazen anglers by those who feel obligated to defend any intrusion into their self-proclaimed territorial waters. Because of the generally uncooperative nature of the fish, even as the screen often showed schools of perch stacked several feet thick, we finished Wednesday with a couple of dozen jumbo perch. We discovered tricks to get them to bite Thursday. I'll share that story next week.