Yellow perch are an abundant and adaptable species, and fishing patterns for them often are just as diverse. Fishing shallow is always an option, even if by midsummer “shallow” means 12 to 15 feet deep along a weededge; but in many lakes and reservoirs across North America, perch spend a great deal of time in deeper water. This is particularly true on the Great Lakes and in other large waters. Spring patterns on these waters often find perch 20 to 30 feet down. By midsummer and fall, they may be 30 to 60 feet deep—sometimes deeper.

One sturdy strategy for these fish is to use spoons fished vertically from an anchored boat. During winter, fishing vertically through the ice is a traditional option, but its equivalent is largely overlooked during the open-water season.

Most perch spoons weigh 1/16 or 1/8 ounce, but spoons up to 1/4 ounce often are the norm on large waters like the Great Lakes. We’ve also made good catches of perch on bigger spoons on Lake of the Woods and Mille Lacs, in Minnesota. Even on large waters like these, smaller spoons get the call most of the time.

Perch usually prefer spoons that have been sweetened with bait like maggots or some other insect larvae, a minnowhead, or sometimes an entire small minnow. One overlooked bait is a crawdad tail divided into tiny portions. The crustacean smell and taste are attractive to perch—so, no surprise that scuds and large grass shrimp can be good too. Another good option can be young-of-the-year panfish or flats, as they’re often called, since ­little bluegills, crappies, and even perch are thin as a dime flattened on a train track.

Modern-day scented artificial baits have also become important the last few years, companies like Berkley leading the way with a variety of Gulp! products for panfish.

Attraction and Triggering

The spoon acts as an attractor and delivery device for the tender morsel of bait. It’s also an illusion: A little flash, a little vibration—a hint of something injured, something struggling. And then it hangs vertically, for all intents and purposes disappearing on the pause except for whatever you’ve tipped the spoon with, which is critical.

We’re hinting subtly at this and that by lifting the spoon and letting it fall. The illusion continues as the perch draws near. The fish isn’t thinking, but reacting to a series of cues. Something flashed and wiggled and fell. Now there’s this little something there—almost nothing, but something. So the fish comes close—within 6 inches.

Perch are sight-feeders that can smell and taste too—but only at close range. When a perch finally enters the zone near the spoon, it enters a slightly more intense window of smell and taste, one  that has a slight but important bearing on whether it finally decides to bite. With a freshly pinched minnowhead hanging there, the fish is more likely to bite. With a fresh maggot on the hook, the fish is also more likely to bite. The point is to change baits often.

Spoon Options

Old standard spoons like the Acme Kastmaster and Bay de Noc Swedish Pimple have caught more perch than most and still produce anywhere you put them into play. Another top option is defined by the Northland Forage Minnow Jig’n Spoon. It’s a long design, ensuring that when it falls, it catches enough water to roll on its side and shimmy and shake in a semi-horizontal position.

Many spoons give off most of their action on the lift, and fall back vertically without a lot of flash and vibration. The Forage Minnow has a holographic finish that plays a role in making it one of the best spoons of all time. H.T. Enterprises makes a spoon like this called the Chatter Spoon, which includes a rattle. Northland also makes a rattling spoon in this style called the Buck-Shot Rattle Spoon.

Another top style includes spoons like the H.T. Enterprise Mirage Spoon and the Blue Fox Rattle Flash Jig’n Spoon. Because of the length of these spoons, the weight’s spread out even more than in a design like the Forage Minnow, so they fall even more towards the horizontal, giving off a little different flash and vibration.

At times perch like longer spoons, while at others they show a preference for more compact spoons. On that end of the scale are the Lindy Frostee Spoon and the Northland Doodle Bug. These fish precisely, giving off a lot of vibration and flash on the lift, then falling almost straight back to their original position at the beginning of the lift.

Droppers

One breakthrough for tentative perch was the introduction and ­widespread acceptance of dropper-rigging in combination with spoons. ­In-Fisherman Editor In Chief Doug Stange, who helped to popularize this type of rigging by writing about it in the early 1980s, suggested making a combo by removing the treble hook from a 1/10-ounce Acme Kastmaster and adding 2.25 to 2.5 inches of 4-pound monofilament line with a 1/64-ounce plain (bare) leadhead jig, which is then packed with maggots.

By this time, Europeans were also using many jig-and-dropper combos. The standard Euro model includes a dropper made of light chain instead of monofilament. They usually just attach a small hook to the end of the chain instead of a leadhead jig, although later introductions include either a jig or an ice fly.

The thing the typical North American angler gets wrong is the length of the dropper line, thinking it has to be longer instead of shorter, probably as a matter of stealth. European dropper lengths tend to be the same 2.25- to 3-inch lengths Stange first suggested. The short dropper doesn’t tangle when it’s jigged, and it also simply triggers more fish. Get the bait too far away from the attracting mechanism (the spoon), and it just doesn’t work well. About 4 inches is as long as a workable dropper can be.

H.T. Enterprises offers dropper chains; just remove the treble hook from your favorite spoon and add the dropper via the metal clip. Northland Tackle, meanwhile, offers a dropper spoon called the Buck-Shot Dropper, which features a single hook. They offer the Dropper Hook separately, or just tie up your own. One improvement to the home-tie process is the availability of Quick Clip Lure Snaps from Northland. Tie up the droppers at home and clip them on in the field. Simple.

Still the leading company in offering prerigged spoons of various designs, dropper chains, and various other dropper options is Hali, a Finnish company with a marketing firm in North America. The most common Hali design is the Pilkit, available in three sizes: 25, 35, and 50 millimeters (1 to 2 inches).

Rattles, Color, Hooks

In theory, rattling makes sense as an attracting maneuver. We have, however, done no conclusive testing to verify which spoons actually do the best job of rattling underwater, though some of our favorite spoons in this ­category have already been mentioned in this article.

Color also makes a difference, with the best perch patterns remaining those that include either gold or silver, along with chartreuse, orange, and perhaps the brighter reds. Glow works well for many fish and at times for perch, especially in deep water during midsummer. We treat glow as another color choice. It’s not magic, just something to experiment with among the other color choices.

Red hooks are a recent fad and, like gold, silver, or plain bronze hooks, seem to help at times. It’s just about impossible to verify the improved-catch connection to red hooks to make us fish with them all the time. I consider them another color option that’s worth tinkering with. But if all you fish with is red, you’re missing the chance to fish gold or silver, and plain bronze.

Lastly, most perch spoons are initially outfitted with small trebles, although many also are marketed with a single hook that can be used to replace the treble. Singles certainly work best when the bite’s good and you want to quickly remove the hook from the fish to get down and catch another. Small, super-sharp trebles can be hard to remove.

What we need is the option to sometimes add a longer single hook. The short singles aren’t much of a change-up from the short treble versions already on most spoons. For perch, longer sometimes makes a difference—longer spoon, addition of a dropper, longer hook hanging from the spoon. A longer hook pivots better and farther than a shorter hook, when a perch sucks in. The Aberdeen-style hook would be perfect, except that it isn’t made with a hook-eye big enough to slide onto a split ring. The only longer hook that works is the Eagle Claw 218, in sizes ranging from #6 to #10.

One additional note here is that many 1/16-ounce and smaller spoons are not enhanced when they include a dual split ring—one to attach the hook on the bottom end and another to tie your line to. The line-tie split ring is just a little too much hardware. Instead, remove it and use a loop knot to connect to the lure.

Jigging Actions

A lot of jigging (lift-falling) often attracts fish, but tentative fish become disinclined to bite when they get there. It’s too much. Too little jigging, on the other hand, won’t attract enough fish overall.

So the process becomes one of attempting to find just what fish respond to over exactly what time frame, and with what jigging sequence and motion. On the extreme end of the scale, we might lift-fall once every minute and then hold for 30 seconds, adding a jiggle or shake occasionally. A more typical scenario would be a lift-fall every 20 seconds or so, followed by a 20-second hold.

A factor that enters the discussion anytime fish are picky is line and spoon twist. Spoons like the Kastmaster don’t twist much on the lift-fall if the lift is done gently. Aggressive fish hit a twisting spoon, but tentative fish often won’t. The twist that results from too much jigging is why you shouldn’t jig so much when fish are tentative.

Lure Lifting

All predatory fish respond to a lure being taken away from them—when you raise the lure. This is done when a fish comes in but won’t immediately take, after you’ve tried nodding (you have to be watching on your sonar). If you lift-fall at this point you’re almost certain to spook the fish. Occasionally what works is to raise the lure, stop, and totally pause once again.

How high above bottom should we begin jigging? Most perch are caught in the zone from 1 to 11⁄2 feet above bottom. They also bite baits presented right on bottom, but they usually don’t take spoons offered that way.

In clear waters, try jigging higher than you might normally do, at times—say, at least 11⁄2 feet above bottom. Here again, even when perch are swimming along the bottom, the presence of a high-hanging lure often intrigues them enough to rise up. If you can get them to come up, you have a good chance of getting them to bite.

If you haven’t already tried fishing with 4-pound Berkley FireLine or another exceptionally thin, no-stretch line, it is one of the single biggest steps you can take this season. Just tie direct with a smoke-colored line, on most waters. In clearer water you should learn to tie in a fluorocarbon leader at the end of the braid using back-to-back uni-knots. Double the end of the braided line with a spiderhitch before tying in the fluorocarbon. (Our website ­in-fisherman. com offers visual instructions for these knots.)

Few panfish are so beautiful as a jumbo perch, a blocky buster of a fish, a perfect handful, with a pair of fillets that make a meal—and, we would add, one of the most exceptional meals on the face of this earth. Harvest selectively and have fun working with a lure category that’s almost entirely overlooked in open water.