I want to live bait fish Texhoma instead of D/R for them. Can catch all I want that way. I have all the live perch I will need and a Grayline 33gal tank. My question is will perch do about as good as shad. I dont want to learn how to get them at this lake now.Do I need to do anything special to the transport water.If you have fished perch at his time of year at Texhoma ,let me know if it will be worth the time. Its a 300 mile trip. thanks.

bigbill-

I've had pretty good success using perch on Texoma, but I've only used them a couple of times. They seem to do pretty well side by side vs. shad. JD (guide extraordinare) gave me a tip to cut the dorsal fin so that it swims sideways and makes it easier for the striper to swallow.

I've got a Keep Alive tank and have no problem keeping perch alive.

Good Luck this weekend. If you have a VHF I'll be on ch 69 on Sat morning.

matt

bigbill,

I used the perch side by side during a good striper bite at Tawakoni earlier this year. It would take the striper about 30sec to 1 min to hit the shad and up to 5 min to hit the perch. Teh ease of transport and being able to keep the perch alive may outweight the preference the striper have for shad. I can spend several hours trying to get the shad but can get perch the day before and keep them alive for days!

The only other thing I would suggest is throwing a frozen water bottle in the tank for transport to keep the water from getting too hot. Replace ice bottles as needed.

Thanks for the replies. I think Im going to try to do it with my tank.

The right size shad would be the absolute best bet. But as stated above perch work very well and based on their surviourablity rate its a trade off on the time it takes the big one to bite. I have fished with both for many years and to be honest I prefer small live perch over shad and that is just do to limited slime and long life. The fish dont care if they are feedin. Shad best (right size!) perch work fine!


The biggest stipper I caught was on a live hand sized perch at Texoma. That bugger came in at 37lbs!. I reckon I need to post a pic of it!

The FishKiller

Fishkiller,

Next time, take your fish and get it weighed on certified scales. The current record at Texoma is 35.12!

I should have mentioned it was on the river and not in the lake. Was kinda sad too. I would have mounted that fish if I would have weighed it when I first caught it but I didnt weigh it until the next morning.

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-7/782490/big-fishy1.jpg


The FishKiller