Thread: White perch

They are eating machines that can throw the lake off balance and wipe out other fish. I have friends that fertilize the garden with them. I will cut little fillets out of pretty small ones if too small for a fish chip they feed the critters.

Real quickly here is a link to a dissertation done by an NCSU student re: Lake Norman. I think I've seen a more user friendly version of this but don't have time to search it out right now. I beleive there have been several papers done about white perch there as well as possibly other NC lakes

They are indeed eating machines. You can catch a tiny perch on a large bass minnow that barely fits in their mouth. I caught a couple on Sat. that literally had 2 or 3 small crappie minnows in it's mouth plus the one I was fishing with. I plan to start keeping them all and doing just like you and filleting the ones that I can.

I bounce them off the back of the boat for Osprey or eagle food. I don't ever want to throw a live one back in the water.

If you have freezer room they make very good tomato food in the spring. Bury them around the plant when you set them out.

Take a look at the 2014 regs and you will see an addition about white perch - you are allowed to net them now. That's how badly they want them gone. They can be fun if you get into the nicer ones, but they are few and far between. Late summer at Harris when they were blitzing it was hard to hate on them. It's pretty cool to have the water churning around you and haul in a fish on nearly every cast.

Also - I have to echo a previous comment about filleting even fairly small ones. If you just trim the ribs away after the first cut and then just cut the back meat off the skin, you get a couple of fish sticks with very little effort.

I have on occasion filleted the smaller ones but I have also just scaled, cut the head off and removed the insides then deep fried them and I have to say that's pretty easy and get more meat. It's also nice to get into them when you have kids on board. Nothing keeps their attention more than really reeling a lot of fish in but you have a lot of explaining to do when you go and don't even get a bite.

I don't know about other people, but to me they taste great. I fillet them skinless and cut the lateral line out. I imagine in a blind taste test a lot of the haters wouldn't know the difference in white perch and crappie. I've always heard how they can choke a lake out, and I believe it. Sometimes when I reel one up I'll see others chasing it trying to get at the bait. But at Lake Waccamaw they have found a pretty nice balance with the native fish. Probably because they are fished so heavily, everyone around here loves to eat them. White perch are actually the main fishery at Lake Waccamaw.