Perch Fishing With Live Worms or Artificial Bait?
Kevin Felts 05.28.18
Call me a traditionalist when it comes to perch fishing. Being raised in the 1970s, dad taught my brother and I to bait perch hooks with real live worms. Here in Southeast Texas a great number of corner stores sell worms in styrofoam containers. So finding worms for perch-jerking is not difficult.
The tradition of using live worms for perch fishing was passed down to my children. From the time they were big enough to hold a rod, my children were taught to bait their perch hooks with worms.
My daughter will dig through a box of worms with a serious lack of squirminess. She focuses in on the crawling critters with the intent of picking the best ones for the size hook she is using.
For all intents and purposes, I firmly believed the best way to catch perch was with real worms.
All of that changed on May 26, 2018 when my oldest son and I went fishing on the Angelina River near Jasper, Texas. My oldest son is a connoisseur of fishing. Having been influenced by a father, uncle, grandmother, and grandfather who value the time-honored tradition of pulling fish from the water, he was taught to fish at an early age. When my oldest son reached his teenage years he started fishing on his own along the saltwater marshes of Southeast Texas.
While we were fishing the Angelina River on May 26, 2018, my oldest son suggested I use a certain artificial lure along some lily pads. To be perfectly honest, I looked at the lure and thought something along the lines of, “What is this supposed to catch?”
A few minutes later I was pulling crappie and other types of perch from the water. As we used the Minn Kota trolling motor to move close to cypress stumps, lily pads, and overhanging tree branches, perch upon perch were pulled from the water:
- Sun perch (Bluegill)
- Crappie
- Goggle-eye
As a traditionalist who has clung to the time-honored way of using worms to catch perch, I was quite impressed with how well artificial bait worked.
For those of you who may be wondering, the lure was a green and black tube. What surprised me most was the lure was around 1/2 inch long. The only bad thing, sometimes I needed a pair of pliers to grip the small lure.
So contrary to popular belief, you can teach an old dog new tricks.
