When Noah and I first started fishing together, one of the first fish we began researching and attempting to find were big migratory white perch. The lake we both grew up fishing had an introduced and stunted white perch population, so I think the whole appeal was in catching the much larger native version of a species we'd been catching for years. We'd heard that they fought pretty hard and could exceed 15 inches in length. Noah actually caught some one day, in summer of 2016, while striper fishing. As soon as we specifically targeted them though, we suddenly couldn't find them to save our lives. We were plagued by bad conditions and often just horrible luck. Sometimes were were even told there were plenty right where we were fishing, but we always failed to catch any.
White perch follow an anadromous lifestyle in their native range along the CT coastline. Some fish in the larger tidal systems, like the Connecticut River may, never actually enter salt or brackish water at all, but along the coast are scattered populations that have a significant saltwater based component to their lifestyle. I should note that white perch are not really a perch, though they're described as a perch-like fish. They belong to the genus Morone and family moronidae, the temperate basses. They are far more closely related to white bass and striped bass than they are any perch. They do often fill a similar niche and even school with yellow perch when the two are present in the same habitat, and as far as body and fin structure they aren't completely dissimilar, so the naming can be forgiven in my opinion.
Throughout much of the year, many white perch are messing around in tidal salt and brackish water, while some of their brethren are up in freshwater. They aren't a perfectly migratory anadromous fish like herring or shad, and unlike striped bass, most of which enter the ocean and perform some manor of significant migration, it seems a fair percentage of white perch are content to knock around in fully fresh water for most of their lives. Others only seem to wander into freshwater to spawn, and these guys and gals are the biggest of the big. These are the white perch that might well attain 16 inches and weight several pounds. These were the white perch Noah and I wanted to catch, and we couldn't seem to.
This brings up a somewhat interesting phenomena we've noticed as life listers. Since we dedicate such a significant amount of time to targeting completely new species, we're routinely aware of this odd and frequent occurrence. It often takes an exceptionally long time to catch the first of a species, sometimes even unnecessarily. Then, once that first one has been caught, we find it either easy, or just easier to catch that species, whether we're actually targeting them or not. At first glance you might think we learned some key piece of information in the process of catching the first one that resulted in the rapid increase in success, but that isn't it. And though Noah and I had already caught probably thousands of white perch, our process of catching salty ones exemplifies this perfectly. We didn't approach it without prior knowledge. We knew spots, whether we were told them or dug them up through thorough research, or even just happened to be fishing them and saw someone else catching big white perch there. And it isn't like white perch are a remotely technical fish. Moreover, we had already caught the species, we just hadn't successfully targeted the populations with a saltwater component to their life history.
Then Noah caught one this past fall. I was with him when that happened, maybe you read the post. Then the funny thing happened. He proceeded to start catching white perch consistently out of the very places we'd been trying for years to find them at. Lifer magic, and this wasn't even a real lifer. I hoped at that point that my time was next, that after years of trying I'd finally have my trophy native white perch. I began searching for them in Rhode Island, in places I knew were known to produce. No luck. Then, while back closer to home in an old haunt targeting holdover stripers with Noah and Garth, it finally happened. I proceeded to catch a few more after that. The seal is broken now, so this should suddenly become much much easier.
Lifer magic is certainly not an isolated phenomena. Fisherman tend to be a little superstitious, sometimes very superstitious. Most of the time, I'm not. Save for this one case.
And maybe a few others.
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