Luck’s Stand-In
It was nearly noon. My skiff was getting low on gas, a chop was building and my cooler was still empty. Having started in the early hours, searching and fishing from Sandy Point to Hackett’s and Tolley’s then up to Podickery and over to Love Point, I was now on my way back to the ramp without a single rockfish.
My eyes ached from looking for feeding sea birds. The only ones that I had spotted appeared as baffled as I was. My bucket of chum was back on ice, as was my supply of menhaden. My casting rods, rigged with top-water plugs and deeper water jigs, remained unused.
It was decision time. Either I quit, pull the boat and head home for a warm meal, a shower and a nap, or I mount a serious second effort. I was tired and hungry, but I knew the forecast ruled out fishing for the next few days. A large foul-weather system was approaching; even now the wind was building.
Deciding to go on, I secured my center console on the trailer, then drove toward more sheltered waters. Days ago I had located a few schools of particularly chunky white perch. Hoping that they were still there, I launched at a convenient ramp and headed back out.
Slowly cruising the channel edge, I saw what looked like a nice school of perch on my sonar screen. I motored back up-current, dropped a hi-lo rig baited with pieces of bloodworm and let out line. Feeling the one-ounce sinker skipping over the shell bottom below, I held my thumb on the spool and drifted along.
Thump, thump, bang! My light rod tip bent down, and the spool turned against the drag. I felt the surges of a good fish below. Then the rod really bent over, telling me a second fish had jumped on. Two nice perch eventually flashed in the sun as I lifted them up and over the side.
I let the smaller guy go, iced the other, over 10 inches, and decided, perhaps impulsively, that 10 inches would be my minimum. Rebaiting, I dropped the rig back down and resumed the quest. The next school lit up my screen, and the fight was on again.
But by 3pm, I had accumulated only two more 10-inch keepers in my box, though I had caught and released dozens of perch. Conditions were now deteriorating. The wind had begun pushing one way, the tide another. My drifts had become hesitant and were resulting in fewer strikes.
I was again considering calling it a day when I noticed a nice school on my fish-finder. Casting back up-current, past where the fish had been marked, I retrieved with sweeps of my rod. Bam, bam: Two fish slammed the baits. The biggest was 11 inches, his buddy a hair smaller.
That simple change turned the key. Drifting or slowly motoring until marking a school, then casting back over them and retrieving the baits with pronounced sweeps resulted in hard, prompt strikes and, almost invariably, nice big perch.
Within another hour I had more than a dozen big, thick black-backed perch in the box.