T-Rok

I like what nys dec did with the sunfish and crappie laws. I would be fine with doing the same for yellow perch. It would be nice to not have to fish through 100 perch to get 25 large perch. I have seen people keep literally 3-4 inch perch in quantities while ice fishing. I asked someone once what do you do with them? and they told me they get a "french fry" of meat from them so they are good enough. I hate cleaning perch as it is (but have to do to eat them lol), but nothing is worse than cleaning one and saying man, why did I keep this one. Lol. I hate cleaning small perch the most. Seems like a waste. But, that being said.. seems to be no shortage of perch anywhere. Only seems to get harder and harder finding bigger perch. Maybe start with a 25 perch limit. Then add a size limit in a few years if necessary. A boat or shanty with 3 or 4 people keeping 150-200 perch seems like overkill and probably leads to small perch populations. Luckily perch can breed when they are still small, so there are still plenty of perch. I would just rather have more large perch.

I like using a double rig. Small vertical jig on top with a palomar knot so it kicks out sideways. I put a small piece of worm on that hook. Then bottom of rig is a tungsten horizontal jig with a plastic minnow.. gulp or sassy shad. I have fished with people using real minnows and plastics seem to work just the same, but you dont need to but minnows or keep changing them as they fall off or get eaten. The worm on top is for scent to draw them in. I get tons of double headers. Better to catch 2 at a time than 1. Also, I am sure I am not alone here, but it sure seems like the more you jig, the more perch that show up. You can get a whole school to come to your boat with enough baits/people. I would bet the other guys you seen just beat you to luring the school to them first. Early bird gets the fish.

I'm not sure what a silver bass is, but I know white bass do kinda look like bigger white perch. They are related. White perch are actually bass (from salt water I think) and are not related to yellow perch at all. But yeah, white perch and white bass are different but similar and can even be tough to tell apart. Usually you can tell by size. I dont know where there are white bass in upstate ny, but I would think they woulda had to end up stocked in some river or lake up here.

Otisco has plenty of white perch. White perch just dont get very big. There are bluegill there. Mostly tons of dinks. Crappie are few and far between, especially keepers. That lake is absolutely infested with alewives too. Not sure how that affects the panfish, but as far as walleye and muskie, they are always full of easy food so makes them harder to catch. Similar in a way to seneca, but much worse. I would think your best shot is white perch there. I see people pulling them up one after the other when I am trolling for muskie and I see large schools of them on the sonar often.. and I know they are white perch because they often get snagged on my lures or bite the bottom treble hook. The white perch are just small. Someone else said cross lake is good for white perch. This is true. The whole seneca river is loaded with them. I tend to think of white perch as nuisance fish since they are so small compared to yellow perch. Please catch and keep as many white perch as possible. Thank you.

I run 2 downriggers, 3 cores and 1 copper in the summer. The trick is like sk8man said.. dont run 2 lines straight out the back of the boat that are going to be around the same depth. You will get tangled badly. Also, make sure you put the deeper running line out first. If you accidentally put the shallow line out first you will go through it with the deeper line. When you are running multiple setups the depths and the order on which you deploy them become very important to avoid trouble. Another thing to account for is leader length and thickness. Generally, the thinner leader, the more it will get hit by fish. Just remember trout do have teeth and get large so not too thin. 12lb test I like to use. Length 25-100ft. 50 is a good compromise. Someone else may say different. Good luck.

I have fished silver lake for pike in the summer a few times and found out the best presentation..at least the best that worked for me. I tried all of the standard pike stuff. They mostly would not touch any stick baits or spinner baits. I took my kids pan fishing using real small jigs tipped with a small piece of worm and started catching pike. I went back by myself with the small jigs and started crushing pike.. I nailed 7 or 8 pike in just a few hours, biggest was 37in. There were 100 boats around. I had people coming over to watch me catch them. Pike didnt seem to care. They like real small stuff in the summer. They were mostly concentrated at the end where the launch was around the edges of the weed line.

offshore sells clamp down style clips that keep the planer boards from popping off. I swapped them out on mine. never have them pop off now.

I am pretty sure that there are also still lakes that alewives are allowed to be used as bait. Not sure about Keuka, but I am pretty sure that Skaneateles is one. Probably several others. Alewives are not good for a lot of reasons. Disease, toxins that they produce, overtaking native baitfish populations.. etc. I dont know how dec comes up with stocking numbers, but I think the answer could be just as easy as stocking more rainbows, browns, and salmon in some of the smaller lakes. Owasco where I live gets way more lakers than anything and some of the larger Fingerlakes (esp. cayuga) seem to get an exorbitant amount more of silver fish than Owasco and other lakes. if it were up to me, I would just stock more silver fish, and add some walleyes to the mix. Dec really seems to hate walleyes, and I think some of th FLTA members are probably the people who complained about walleyes in owasco.. now they are almost gone.