The perch population should be ok. When alewife populations fall, perch populations rise. The lakers may be eating small perch but without perch fry predation by adult prespawn alewife, perch numbers should be ok.
All this downtime has helped me get better at painting. Custom Hammerhead Cowbells I painted up the other day. Sent from my iPhone using Lake Ontario United mobile app
Switch the rigger to a different plug on the other side of the boat and see if the problem still exists. Sometimes the plugs go bad and this can happen.
Speed all depends on the lures you are running and less than the time of year. Colder the water, usually you will want to troll slower. If that is the case, make sure you are running lures that will work properly at those speeds.
An easy way to keep them from dying is bring them up slower. The slower you bring them up, the less chance they have of blowing up. I also burp them and send them back head first. We have very few floaters a season and those floaters are given away to a neighbor that loves them.
Conesus is tough unless you have it figured out. Night bite is where its at for May and June. A summer daytime pattern in July August and September and then a night bite again in the fall.
With the warm water temps all winter, there was more than likely a big hatch like 2017. More availability? That size alewife were sucked in our intake all winter. Usually once Mid January arrives, we do not see any alewife until March.