I love perch. My parents also loved perch and made frequent trips to Pelican Lake to find them. At the age of three, I had a cane pole thrust into my hands and was taught to watch a bobber. About 10 years later, I had a knife handed to me and taught how to fillet them. My dad told me that the first 500 would be the hardest. He was right.
Anyway, a month ago my friend Jack Alters called and told me that he and his wife Kim had room in a cabin they were renting on Cass Lake in northern Minnesota. He said the perch there were big and plentiful. I cleared my calendar.
Like the more well-known Lake Winnibigoshish, Cass Lake is a perch factory. Ten thousand acres of crystal-clear water in which fish were plainly visible down to eight or nine feet. Fortunately for me, Jack had been there three or four years in a row and knew a number of good spots to try.
We were blessed with calm winds and warm weather on the days I was there and the fish were cooperative. While other boats at the resort lugged minnow buckets out to their boats, Jack and I fished only with plastics. Jack was using something called ‘Eye Candy,’ which I thought looked way too big for perch but obviously was not. I used Crappie Magnets under a bobber or a small chartreuse paddletail on a jig. All of the above worked well.
