Emerald Shiners: The Meal Ticket for Perch.

The past few days have been slow perch fishing in the bay.  A few jumbos are being caught most everywhere in the bay.  The problem this year is twofold.  Due to the lack of ice, there are literally millions of emerald shiners in the bay that the fish can feed on.  The other problem is that this April has been mostly sunny with few fronts moving through. 

I managed to catch a few nice perch over the past couple days and noticed that they are now done spawning and engulfing and gorging themselves on the shiners.  Check out the fish below.  It had 16 shiners in its' belly!  I have never seen that many minnows in a fish.  This illustrates that the perch are having little problem finding food.  With the millions of minnows in the bay, it is a wonder that any fish can be caught.  They probably feed for just a couple minutes and then they are stuffed for a few days.  Warmer weather will drive the perch out of the bay and into Lake Erie.  The perch will start to follow them out and thats when we should catch a lot more fish.  Good luck fishing!