Lake Simcoe Perching

Fished the Virginia Beach area on Lake Simcoe in Ontario, Canada with Dwayne and Fred. The ice was 5 to 6 inches thick. Temperature this morning was in the lower 30s and when we quit fishing it was in the middle teens. The wind was howling out of the northwest around 50 MPH. It rained, sleeted, hailed and snowed so it was a good thing that we had a rented fishing hut. I poked my head outside the fishing hut one time and could only see about 20 feet. We fished in 7 to 8 feet of water to the right of Virginia Beach. The water was very clean in the morning and then it started to cloud up around lunch time. We figured the high winds and all the open water caused the water to get dirty. We constantly had fish in the holes so we had to pick out the jumbos that we wanted to catch. Once the water got dirty we would try and bring a pod of fish up off the bottom to where we could see them and hope there would be a jumbo perch in the group that we could catch. My best set up was a large slab grabber and Fred used mostly minnows on a red hook. Dwayne was using a small jig with a red plastic tail tipped with a spike. It sure makes it a lot of fun to sight fish for jumbo perch. We kept around 70 perch today.