Sprawling Lake St. Clair is a hotspot for spring panfishing in southeast Michigan. So, Dr. Steve Smith and his good friend and information Jeremy Ullmann headed there to catch fish for the cooler on April 25. They left a public boat ramp at about 8 a.m. and bumped into the lake alongside the St. Clair River.
“We have been out simply fishing for groceries,” Smith tells Outside Life. “We needed good-eating panfish to fry. So, we focused yellow perch and the rest that hit.”
Ullmann and Smith, a 70-year-old dentist from Adrian, Michigan, fished a number of spots by means of the day utilizing ultralight spinning tackle and dwell minnows. They blistered the fish.
“We caught dozens of jumbo yellow perch, so much as much as 13 inches, plus some walleyes, white bass, smallmouth bass and catfish,” says Smith, a long-time native fisherman with wide-ranging fishing expertise — including 53 world records (a mixture of all-tackle and line-class data). “We launched the smallmouths and catfish, and later I filleted 93 fish. It was a haul.”
They’d caught so many fish that by 3 p.m. they have been about prepared to go in. That’s when Smith hooked one thing so massive and powerful, he thought it was a smallmouth.
“I knew it was a very good one, and once I pulled it up and swung it aboard the boat, I assumed it was possibly a white bass, which we’d already caught that day,” he explains. “However I’ve fished there for many years, and knew it wasn’t the best colours of a white bass. It was far more silver, and I figured it needed to be an enormous white perch. … So we tossed it within the dwell properly, and stop fishing for the day.”
The fish died within the dwell properly, nevertheless, so the anglers put it on ice. They went fishing for walleyes the following day, however Smith couldn’t cease excited about how giant the white fish was — at the same time as he was nonetheless unsure a couple of optimistic species identification.
“I had a fishery biologist good friend take a look at it a pair days later and he stated it was a white bass,” Smith reported. “However I simply knew it was a white perch. So I received a second opinion a couple of days later [and took] it to a Michigan DNR workplace.”
There the fish was positively recognized as a whopper white perch by Cleyo Harris, a DNR fisheries biologist.
“The fish was later inspected by a bunch of state biologists they usually all stated it was a white perch,” Smith defined. “They weighed the fish, and authorized it as a brand new state document for the species.”
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Smith’s document white perch weighed 2.592 kilos and was 13.57 inches lengthy. It tops the earlier Michigan white perch document caught in 2015 by Cindy Cordo from Muskegon County’s Bear Lake.
The IGFA all-tackle white perch record is 3.5 kilos, from Wachusett Reservoir, Massachusetts, taken by Val Percuoco in Oct. 2016.
Smith left the fish on the DNR workplace within the occasion biologists needed to do any DNA testing, although that hasn’t proved vital He has no plans to reproduction mount his whopper white perch, as a result of it’s simply one among many data he’s caught over a lifetime of angling.
“I’ve so many different fish mounts in my home I’ve no place to place one other one like a white perch.”