There is a kind of Great Lakes fishing that involves downriggers, expensive electronics, and a man in the back of the boat saying the word program a great deal. Perch fishing is not that. Perch fishing is a bucket, a bag of minnows, a rod that cost less than lunch, and a September morning off the Milwaukee breakwall with the city sitting there behind you pretending it has somewhere to be. Lake Michigan gives you a lot of hard days. This is one of the kind ones.
We got out at first light in about thirty two feet of water off the gap, which is where everybody goes, because everybody has always gone there. There were nine boats already anchored and one gentleman on the wall itself who appeared to have been assembled on site sometime in the nineteen seventies. Somebody hollered over that the fish had been on the north end the day before. Somebody else hollered back that the fish had been nowhere the day before, and that was the last honest thing anybody said all morning.
Perch move. That is the whole difficulty and the whole charm. You will sit on a school for twenty minutes hauling them up two at a time, and then the rig goes quiet as a church and you have to decide whether they left or you did something wrong. The correct answer is usually that they left, but nobody believes that in the moment, so instead you change hook color, then minnow size, then your entire personality. Meanwhile the old man on the wall who has not moved his feet since sunrise is putting them in a five gallon bucket at a steady, insulting pace.
We found them again around eight in a little deeper water, and for half an hour it was exactly the fishing everybody remembers from being nine years old. Bright green backs, orange fins, that stubborn little head shake all the way up. A perch is not a large animal and does not pretend to be. It just wants to be caught in numbers and eaten the same evening, and it is honest about that in a way most fish are not.
We ran back in with a decent count, well short of a limit, and stopped at the ramp to look in the bucket belonging to the old man, out of pure masochism. It was full. He said the trick was patience and then, after a pause, that it was also knowing where to sit. We asked where to sit. He pointed at the exact spot he had been standing on for forty years and wished us luck.
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