My brother, my neighbor, and I went to Calaveras last week in search of redfish. We ended catching 46 "rat reds" and 2 "keeper" size reds. Reds have to be
20 inches long to be keepers at Cal. We also caught a couple of nice size catfish and 9 keeper size perch. The perch were a real surprise. My brother kept
complaining about something nibbling his bait off but never taking the bait. I told him it was probably perch so we rigged his rod with a smaller hook. Bingo !
He caught the one in the pic below. So I spent some time doing the same thing and we caught about 15 perch and we kept 9 really nice perch. The one in the
pic was the biggest and it weighed almost a pound. All fish were caught on shrimp, fishing on the bottom in 10-12 feet of water on various humps in the
Calaveras Creek arm of the lake. My neighbor is just learning how to fish and he had a great time and caught half of the rat reds we caught. For their size
they put up a tussle !

Nice fish. Well done.

That's a wide bluegill! Good job Doc

Doc...Super nice catch ! Would love to see more pics of the sunfish if you have any...

Awesome post and nice fish. Good job guys.



Side Note: Cally has some "Big Bluegill"!

That's a heck of a perch!......I know, I know!
No disrespect but that's what I grew up calling them!
Awesome job!

Thanks guys. Chuck — thought of your past comments about “big bluegill” at Cal when we started catching these ! Steve — I meant to take some pics of the other perch but we didn’t get home until after dark and didn’t clean the fish until next morning. They didn’t look very picture worthy after a night in the cooler. Jimbo — They will always be perch to me too !!

Nice fish doc! Did yall measure the girth on that bluegill?

nice post and fish Doc
I've done a little research on that lake. Would love to catch a few of those reds. That sunfish was a monster, may have been a record for that lake.

Thanks PL !

Didn’t measure the girth but I could barely get my hand around him. We did measure his length and weighed him. He was 9 inches long and 14.1 ounces. We were calling him a Frisbee Perch lol. The other ones we kept were very similar in shape. Very tall for their length. All were very thick too. Made some nice filets.

JonBoat — Thanks ! The record for bluegill and red ear are both over a pound on Cal. The perch in the pic was actually a hybrid of the two species.

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Looks like y'all had a great day on the water!

Back in the day, before they shut down the "crappie wall" there were some huge bluegill pulled out from around the concrete wall.
There is a Youtube video of them catching them floating around somewhere if you try a search on Youtube.

Nice post. I love fishing Calaveras.

Nice fish.