I went out for 3 hours from Waverly Park shortly after noon in my kayak. I cruised around looking for schools of perch and found them between 65' and 90' of water straight out from the park. Some of the schools were like the ones that slabman posts where I marked solid fish from the bottom up ~20 feet. Other places you could see just a few on the bottom. I caught plenty where the sonar didn't mark anything at all.

I ended up with 23 keepers between 8" and 10.5". I lost a few on the way up and threw back a bunch of 6"-7". I started out fishing gulp 1" smelt minnows and for the last hour fished perch fillet. Both worked but the fillet seemed to get the bigger keeper perch. I usually only use gulp to keep by kayak clean but I might be sold on the perch fillet.

I used a 1oz "glow" color Cabela's jigging spoon(replaced treble with siwash) as weight plus 2 drop shot hooks about 18" apart up the leader. Some fish hit really hard, some you could barely feel at all. That spoon seems huge for perch but I caught 5 or 6 on it.

The perch I threw back took a few minutes to get their swim bladders adjusted to dive back down. I could see them on the sonar slowly swimming back to the bottom. One of the perch didn't pressurize in time and was grabbed by a bald eagle about 40 feet behind my kayak. Really cool to see but scared me when it happened.

After 3 the sun started going down and it started getting much colder. I caught 2 more keepers on my way in.

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