Urban EP's

You know...i hate cliches - and the most bandied around in fishing is 'enigmatic'. This fish is an enigma, it has enigmatic behavoiur blah blah blah. The problem is, if one fish can truely be called enigmatic, the Estuary Perch is it! I've been looking for a better descriptor for a long time now but mysterious doens't cut it, neither does peculiar. So i guess for now an enigma will have to do!

Sorry to digress but every time i think of EP's i get a sense of excitement. While i reckon i got these little blighters figured out somewhat i still have fishless days chasing them. There are other days where i sound out massive schools and they won't play the game and other days when the takes are so timid you don't have time to set the hooks. Either way it can be quite frustrating at times. In a sense though that's the appeal. Every now and again you get a reality check and these little buggers put your inflated fishing ego back in the top draw!

If you havent caught a Perch around Sydney and you have a burning desire to catch one, now is the time. Autumn sees the Perch on the move in the estuaries and are usually a little easier to find than normal. This is the time they start to make thier annual pilgrammage to the mouths of the rivers and creeks to spawn. This migration is a slow process and the fish could be on the move for a few months before they settle in to thier spawning patch. So the essence to finding them is to look for the highway routes out of creeks heading toward the main flow of the river. They won't be in the fianl positions now but should be spread across a fairly large area.

When i go looking for Perch now i tend to focus on the middle of the creeks rather then the edges. Look for deep holes adjacent to bends in the creek, eddies or current lines. They are quite sedentary creatures and don't like to waste energy in the fast current but need to station themselves close enough to it to snatch an easy meal being swept by.

They are extremely easy to find on a sounder too. EP's don't do a very good hiding job. If you find them you will find hundreds of them. To the un-trained eye they may look like a school of bait suspended just off the bottom but bait usually hangs a little higher in the water column. They should show up a meter or less from bottom. Don't be surprised either if your sounder max's out with readings too, its still working fine, it's just that at this tme of year the fish are tightly packed. Getting them to bite though is another story!

In my experience they will be feeding on prawns almost exclusively now. The days around the dark of the moon will see the best bite as the prawns move down. For that reason small lures resembling prawns are dynamite. Even grubs or jerk minnows still work even though they dont look like prawns but use a natural colour to imitate the colours of prawns. I like chartreuse the best. In the Hawkesbury River the colour chartreuse is a dead ringer for the famous Hawkesbury prawn.

Now Ep's are more wide spread than you may think. In Sydney thay can be caught in the Hacking, George's River (around in excellent numbers), Parramatta River & Upper Middle Harbour, Narrabeen Lagoon and the Hawkesbury River and every tributary that feeds it. They are recovering really well in the urban areas these days. Most fishos practice catch-and-release and if a feeding school is found cricket score catches can be made so stick to the stringent bag limits if you do want to nibble on one. But i reckon they are far too important to be caught just once.

Also please remember that during winter there is a closed season to allow EP's and Bass for that matter to spawn, so do the right thing, let them have thier privacy!