Fish Number 2 Yellow Perch (Perca flavescens)

Went out in search of fish number two the other day, the target was white perch Morone americana, but you can't control what fish eat your bait...

Leavitt Bay Effingham NH, Lake Ossipee

We sought advice from a local bait shop, they recommended we head to Lake Ossipee the recommendation was to find a spot with between 20 and 30 feet of water and try to find the school. So we headed to Camp Marist in Effingham, I work there in the summer as their naturalist and got permission from the brothers to fish there.

Knee deep snow, it could be worse!

Luckily they had plowed right to the beach at Leavitt Bay, so we had to to cross a couple hundred feet of deep snow to get to the lake which had almost no snow on it. Dave (the smart guy) thought to bring his snowshoes with him, I on the other hand decided to pack light and left my snowshoes at home. It's just as well as we needed some fun pictures anyway...

snowshoe hare

After a lot of cussing and scrambling through deep snow we made it to the ice and proceeded to drill holes, it was a beautiful day and the only other sign of life on the lake was a set of snowshoe hare tracks crossing the lake.

We drilled holes in the ice until we found a likely spot and quickly caught the only fish we'd see all day. One dinky little yellow perch. Dave pulled this lunker through the ice jigging with a tiny jig tipped with a wax worm. Now our rules dictate that we must eat the first legal example of the species we catch, yellow perch have no size limits so we had no choice we had to eat the dink...Who made these rules anyway? Check back soon for the perch recipe...

Dave finds every fish to be exciting!