I'm guilty of callin' 'em perch too. Heard 'em called perch since I was little, so it's hard to break the habit.

Yep, local terminology sometimes befuddles. Bluegills are called perch. Bigheads, Silvers, Amur, even buffs are called carp. Fish terminology is really a local thing. Same fish get called different things depending on where you go. Often the names overlap as in the case of yellow perch and bluegill.

Bluegill and big redear sunfish are a couple favorites. Pound for pound they rock! Ultralite and pencil bobber you can fill a bucket in the right place and at the right time. Hand sized or so, they are some of the tastiest fish out there. Crappie are tops, but fried bluegill fillets are a feast!

Brian - yea buddy, you couldn't have said it better!! There's just something about fried bream that once you start eating them, you can't stop until you're ready to pop!

Oh, bluegill are not gamefish from a previous post, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to use them for fishing.

Chris

Breambuster:
What area of TBend do you go for Bream? I usually go to Alpine Marina but would like to try something different.
Uncle Jess

I caught one of my biggest bluegill out at Lake Holbrook by Mineola. I was fishing minnows under bobbers and thought I had caught a bass. Damn thing musta weighed almost 2lbs it was HUGE.

ksutton - recipe????

do you artificial guys use the whole worm or cut it...and is wacky rigging it the way to go?

finally, do you put a split shot on and fish it on the bottom, or stick to a bobber/cork presentation?

when the weather warms up - this is how i keep the five year old busy when carp fishing....

UncleJess - I fish REAL close to you around the log jam, pine ridge then before the bluff and also over toward Indian Mounds. We used to launch out of the Den Marina, but since it's closed, I've been out of Lowe's Creek which is kinda halfway from all those areas.

Geekfish - I use a split shot about 18" above a #4 gold Aberdeen and cast out toward the beds. They'll usually straighten the line out before it hits the bottom...if not, I reel slowly until I see the line twitch or it straightens out.

I've gotten away from using crickets year ago since they're so expensive and mealworms are so cheap. You can catch 2-3 big bull bream on a single mealworm whereas you're cricket is all chewed up. I haven't tried the Gulp baits yet for them, but they will hit a 1/32, 1/64 or a 1/80 oz. marabou jig that I tie. Sometimes I tip it with a crappie nibble if they're not hitting them hard, but usually I don't have to do that.

i fish for them a lot. we had a little fishing contest at my friends pond. i brought my ultra light with 2 pound line and my regular bass fishing pole. caught a few bass on my regular pole so i switched to my ultra light and put on a swirl tail jig. best lure ever but im all out of them and cant find any but my cousin in new york gives me them when i go up there in the summer. even just 6 or 8 inch blue gills fish pulling drag. the bass and big 10 inch blugills i caught were a great fight on ultra light. got broken off a few times when i couldent stop a few big bass the ran into a brush pile. since then i havent fished much for them becuase ive been fishg salt water, home work, school, and i had elbow surgy right after that but i healed up and ready to go for them again.

Berkley makes a little meal worm I use for bream, on a jig under a lite bite float on an ultralite, can catch ten of em on one sometimes. They have a lot more taste then crappie I think and sure make great catfish bait also.

LOL yanks are so funny!!! What ever THEY call something is always the RIGHT thing and any thing else is the WRONG thing. I have been perch jerking all my life and since I live in Texas and am fishing in Texas, that is the RIGHT name for them. Perch covers a broad range of fish. When I was little we fished for sun perch, white perch and goggle eye perch. I am not sure of the scientific name for each BUT I could go and ask my frends if they wanted to go perch fishing and they knew what I was talking about. Crappie and bluegill were some foreign fish and I used to wonder what they looked like! My Granny fished for crappie but I was afraid to call them that for fear of getting my mouth washed out with soap. They were White perch to me and still are to some extent. That is like sheephead, I hear yanks talk about them but THEIR sheephead don't have teeth and the ones I used to fish for on the coast had a mouth full. Each locality had THIER names and only a yank would expect an entire regeon to conform to HIS personal selection of names.

Now on to what I came to theis thread for... Man I went fishing Saturday evening and I was catching the biggest goggle eyed pearch that I have ever seen. To me a goggle eyed perch is a mean little critter that looks sort of like a cross between a bluegill and a bass. They have a yellow belly and a lot bigger mouth than a bluegill but are sized and shaped sort of like one. Mostly they are MEAN and will attack a lure or bait that is bigger than them with gusto. These mutant goggle eyes though were running almost a foot long and weighed a little over a pound!! I'm going back this week and catch a mess of them for supper. They were hitting anything that I threw out. I caught them on grubs, 3/8 oz spinner baits, rattle traps, plastic worms, and even buzz baits!! All of this while casting into a gale force wind with waves white capping across this little pond like it was the Gulf Of Mexico!! I had my belly boat with me but there was no way I was going to set sail out accross THAT sea!

What do y'all call these critters? I have heard them called war mouth and rock bass and a few other names not fit to be repeated. I personally thought that they were fun to catch but I wasn't trying to fish a tournament and they wouldn't leave my lures alone. (That is when those other names have been heard!)

I am very fortunate. Because of my business, I make contact with a lot of pond owners and because I am just so damn nice they all invite me to fish on their ponds. NOBODY perch fishes anymore so a lot of these ponds are infested with MONSTER perch of all kinds. My favorite perch is the hybred bluegill, they get huge if they are left alone and fight hard on lite to ultra-lite tackle.

What I would like is to find a way to fish for my carp out of my tube. Can you imaging the TOW that one of those freight trains would give you accross open water!!!!

Cheers and good fishing to all!!

sounds kinda like what I call rock bass. They look kinda like a sunfish with a bass-type mouth. THey are preditors. Used to catch 'em in creeks as a kid, but never any big ones.

-Alan

My wife is from Port Gibson mississippi..... we will be there next week. I cannot wait to go. I get with my brother in laws and purchase about one hundred crickets for a couple of bucks, and head to the pond. we catch the biggest perch bluegill red bellies what ever you call them, and scale the and gut them and fry them whole. hard to find live crickets here but this time of the year in mississippi every bait shops is selling crickets. and the bonus is the bass and cats will gladly nail them too.......

rockbass, goggle eye, sound a lot like green sunfish.

ref http://www.cnr.vt.edu/efish/families/greensun.html

That's the creature EXACTLY!!! That one though doesn't have the PCP crazed look that is their norm though. If these suckers got any bigger, it wouldn't be safe to go in the water!!

Since we are all getting an education here, is a yellow belly sun perch a bluegill too??

That is a good site where the picture of the GREEN sunfish is. The first fish that they call a Black Crappie is what I call a White perch and the second is a Crappie. They look a lot different in the waters that I fish and the White Perch is usually an almost solid white and slimmer version of the Black Crappie.

DanL - No idea what a Goggle-Eye Perch is. If you can get a picture, I can probably tell you what I call it. Lol.

I don't really care what people call fish. I just try to use the correct name, and by correct name, I mean the actual general species name that organizations like the Parks and Wildlife department would use, rather then whatever the locals of any area would use.

You mentioned Sheephead up north, that's what they call Freshwater Drum up there. I never called them that, I just called them Freshwater Drum lol. I don't call Bluegill perch very often, because we really do have true perch in the country, and even a few places in the state of Texas. Yellow perch, they're rather long and narrow, a yellowy color with a whitish belly, and have brown or black stripes.

As for your fish, I've heard Rockbass referred to as Goggle-Eye, and I've heard Warmouth referred to as Goggle-Eye, so one of those species is a good bet. They are actually two seperate species though. In Texas Rockbass are a lot more rare then Warmouth, and I think Warmouth tend to get bigger, so that's what you might be catching.

And yes, carp in a float tube would be awesome!