Chasing Yellow Neds

By Jack Trammell

“The ways of the perch are well worth learning!” wrote biologist Frank Thone in 1930, referring to the yellow perch. “When he comes to the table, he can hold his head and tail with the most aristocratic of them!”

Perca is the early Greek word for “perch,” and flavescens, the Latin word for “becoming gold colored.” No single species of fish tells the story of the Chickahominy River better than the story of the yellow perch. The yellow perch has countless local names all over North America and Canada: American perch, bandit fish, calico bass, convict, coon perch, coontail, Eisenhower, jack perch, jumbo perch, lake perch, perch, raccoon perch, red perch, redfin, redfin trout, ringtail perch, ringed perch, river perch, sand perch, striped perch and yellow ned. It has been successfully introduced in seemingly obscure places, such as reservoirs in Nebraska or South Dakota. Amongst Chickahominy sportsmen and women, the fish is commonly called simply a ring perch. I prefer to call it a yellow ned.

In Maryland and Virginia in the Chesapeake Bay region, yellow perch have traditionally grown very fast. In the Chickahominy Lake and River, adult ring perch commonly range between six to twelve inches in length, with the river below the dam generally holding larger fish. The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) citation program recognizes any fish twelve inches or longer as a citation fish. Some states like North Carolina have a fourteen-inch citation (a very large ring perch). Many old-timers along the river remember when two- and three-pound ring perch ranging to sixteen inches in length were commonplace. The longest recorded length anywhere is twenty-one inches.

Ring perch seemed almost to disappear in the Chickahominy between the 1950s, when there were several newsworthy ring perch fish kills in bay rivers, and the 1960s and ’70s, when pollution and toxins reached their peak levels. Not surprisingly, the river’s famous largemouth bass population also declined precipitously during this period, much to the dismay of regional anglers. In the 1990s, the ring perch made a comeback in the Chickahominy and many other Chesapeake Bay river watersheds, but nowhere has the ring perch returned in the numbers or sizes relative to the first half of the previous century, when the fish supported a thriving commercial fishery in tidal rivers all around the bay, from Maryland south to almost North Carolina. Some Maryland rivers are still closed to recreational and commercial harvesting or limited to five fish per day.

Bill Buck, a seasoned angler and long-time Chickahominy waterman, has his own system for monitoring the health of the Chickahominy ring perch. As a master angler with more than ten citation ring perch caught in the river and lake, he is a relative civilian expert on the ring perch.

“It’s my favorite fish,” he says unabashedly. “They have personality. And very few people appreciate their beauty or their angling pleasure. It seems to me that they are slowly coming back. Nothing like the old days of course, but better than it was.”

According to Bill and other seasoned anglers in the mid-South, yellow perch love water temperatures around sixty-eight degrees, give or take a few degrees. Buck has kept detailed fishing logs since the 1980s, including water temperatures for fish caught, and the collective data for hundreds of ring perch catches confirm this suggestion. Buck, the master angler for ring perch, has come to love yellow neds after years of fishing for many other species, both commercially and recreationally (he last won a bass tournament in 1981, more than twenty-eight years ago).

Using his logs for a series of years, peak fishing times on the lower river seem to be in the months of September and October, as the water slowly cools. The numbers of fish caught per trip in the mouths of creeks and in the guts farther up the creeks double and triple in these months. Population sampling by the state in 2006 through 2008 suggests that the lake is not overflowing with large yellow perch. Only four citation ring perch were caught in the lake in 2008, and the longest fish sampled in that period by the state was ten inches (two inches below a citation). Below the dam, more citation perch have been caught (many by the author and Buck), but still not in the quantity of former days.

There are as many ways to fish for yellow neds as there are names for the fish. In North Carolina, anglers fish for raccoons using crickets on the bottom with a float on the top. They are characterized as “notorious bait-robbers. The ring perch is carnivorous and therefore a very active fish in pursuit of food. It is almost always an opportunist that may seize the moment when presented with a tempting meal, even at odd times of day. Another rule of thumb Bill insists on is using live bait. On every successful yellow perch quest, we have tipped our hooks with live wax worms.

A saying along the Chickahominy goes: “Where you catch one ring perch, there is always another one still there.” But part of the ring perch riddle along the Chickahominy is that seldom are more than three or four large fish pulled from any single location at one time, except during the spawn. The ring perch school in the main river for the spawn in the late winter, usually February on the Chickahominy, during which time the females will move northwest toward Walker’s Dam and lay long ribbons of attached eggs, which the males follow to fertilize. The adults then leave the eggs to their own fate, and the hatchlings must fend for themselves.

In the lake, of course, the tide makes absolutely no difference in when you can catch ring perch. Captain Art Conway, guiding from Ed Allen’s launch, has proven this in varying conditions, excluding the time frame when the dam was broken and fishing was unpredictable. But in the lower river, fishing on the outgoing tide is almost always better. It has to do with the way food travels and cycles in the river food chain.

“If you aren’t catching anything, and it’s a spot you suspect holds fish, you need to fish deeper. Make sure you’re getting to the bottom,” Bill Buck suggests.

Some anglers insist that fish marking with a fish finder is critical: “They will mark as short thin lines, generally no more than a half foot from the bottom.”

Other approved techniques for netting trophy-size ring perch are fairly simple. Vertical jigging blades tend to work well in deep lakes, such as Lake Moomaw (where the Virginia state record comes from), but in tidal Chesapeake Bay tributaries like the Chickahominy, yellow neds respond rapidly to crappie jigs and spinner combos with live bait, fished at the mouth of creeks and guts in deeper water. In the lower Chickahominy (below Walker’s Dam), it is key to fish on the outgoing tide and, when possible, at dawn or in late afternoon (thus matching tide and time of day is important). Depth and temperature are critical, so the yellow ned hunter must be ready to adjust and experiment.

[Some of the material in this article appears in “Down on the Chickahominy” to be released in November 2009]