Fishing is one of the most popular sports in the world that is enjoyed by men and women of all ages. It is a great way to spend your spare time relaxing on the water or improving your skills enough to try and win amazing prizes by entering tournaments. Regardless of the reason behind your fishing trips when it comes to the most popular bait to use, minnows are at the top of the list.

You can buy minnows from any bait shop but if you do a lot of fishing it would be beneficial to catch your own minnows instead of buying them each time you go out. You can make your own traps to catch the minnows you need for fishing so you will have them available anytime you are ready to go out on the water. There are several effective ways to make a minnow trap and below you will find two examples that are easy to make and work great.

Trap One:

Use two plastic bottles and label them number 1 and 2. Leave the cap on bottle number 1 and cut off the bottom portion of the bottle about three fourths of the way down. Now cut off bottle number 2 about one forth of the way down the bottle and take the cap off of this one. Discard the bottom portions of both bottles.

Next, you need to put bottle number 2 (the short one) inside of bottle number 1 with the tops pointing in the same direction. Then you need to secure the bottoms together where you cut off the bottom portions.

You can punch holes around the edges of the bottles where they are cut off and use string to run through these holes to tie them together. They need to be secure so pull the string tight before tying off. You will need to leave two pieces of string on each side of the bottle long enough to use for tossing out the trap and pulling it back in again. This is the perfect minnow trap because once the minnows swim into the first opening it is hard for them to swim back out because the outer bottle is still capped off. To make this trap you need to take a piece of screen wire and roll it around into a cone shape. The size of the wire you need will depend on how large or small you want the trap to be. Use a piece of thin wire to tie the cone shape together by running it through the holes of the wire. You will then need to tie some sinkers to the bottom of the cone to weigh it down and hook a small piece of wire on each side of the large top part of the cone. Use these to tie a line onto the cone for tossing the trap into the water and pulling it back to you again.

There are other ways to make a minnow trap as well. The basic principal behind the trap is to have a device that will allow the minnows to easily swim in but make it not so easy for them to get back out. Since minnows will rarely go back out the same opening they swam into, these traps will work very well. They are drawn to the trap by the bait you use. So as you can see catching your own minnows for fishing is quite easy.

Yellow Perch are a very easy fish to catch one you have located them. The key concept in perch fishing however is finding the fish.Yellow Perch are a fish that likes to travel is large schools. Unlike many other fish a school of perch can have fish of many different sizes, they do not school by size. When fishing for perch you need to realize that ninety five percent of the fish will be in less than five percent of the available water.

They prefer a temperature of sixty six to seventy two degrees Fahrenheit. Yellow Perch also like water that is somewhat deep, but their definition of deep may differ than ours. In a lake with an average depth of six to eight feet you will surely find the large perch in a deep fifteen foot hole somewhere in the lake. If however you are fishing a huge lake with depths over one hundred feet you will find them most likely in water no deeper than thirty feet.

Yellow Perch like structure to work from. Their favorite natural food is the crayfish. This means they like to inhabit areas near the rocks crayfish like to hide in. In many ways the perch is much like the Walleye. They are part of the same family and have many of the same proclivities. Unfortunately for the perch they are the main forage species for Walleye as well.

There are many way for the angler to catch a large quantity of nice perch. When fishing for Yellow Perch the goal should be to look for jumbo sized perch. Small perch are really a dime a dozen and not worth the efforts of a true sportsman.

For starters you need to keep your equipment as light as possible. I like to use a light action rod of about 6 foot length. Use a high quality rod that will allow you to feel bites. Remember always that a Yellow Perch can be a very wary species of fish that picks up bait very lightly. If you do not have a rod with the sensitivity to feel these light taps you will miss many fish you might otherwise have caught.

The reel is perhaps the least important aspect of perch fishing. Any functioning spinning reel will do. You will never need a drag and certainly does not need a great deal of reel power to bring even the largest jumbo perch to the boat.

The most important thing to keep in mind is to keep your fishing line thin. I recommend using fluorocarbon line to take full advantage of its invisibility value. For a project some day you should cut even sized strips of your favorite monofilament and fluorocarbon lines and inspect them in water, somewhat murky water like you encounter fishing. You will be surprised at the true difference between the two in terms of visibility. I would select a line of either two or four pound test. Anything more is overkill that will hurt your chances of hooking a fish while giving you absolutely no added value.

If you are an avid fisherman, you probably have heard the old advice that the best bait you can get will come from the waters in which you are fishing. That being good advice, it is always good to know how to set up minnow traps so that you can catch the minnows right from the waters in which you intend to cast your hook!

Well, if you either adhere to that old advice or you want to test the theory, you can always use a minnow trap. You can make a minnow trap, or you can buy one, but after that, you will need to know how to set up a minnow trap.

Purchasing a trap is easy. They are available at retail locations varying from hardware stores to sporting goods stores to the sporting goods department of local stores and bait shops. Or you can make your own.

To Make your own minnow trap, you can use a couple of old soda bottles. Just cut the bottoms off, and discard them. Leave the bottle cap on one, and take the cap off the other. Place it, uncalled end down, inside the other, and trim the two so that they match up.

Use a heated nail or an awl to poke holes about every inch and a half around where they connect, and tie together with individual lengths of twine. Be sure to tie securely. Then, poke a couple of holes in the bottom bottle. Attach a rope to the trap, so that it can be secured to a stable object and not float away in the water.

Now, to bait the trap, you will need something to entice the minnows into your trap. Items such as bread crumbs work well, and most everyone has that item readily available, so at least to begin with, it might be your best bet. Some other items you might have available at home are dry dog or cat food, liver (most people think of chicken liver when they think of fish bait, but studies seem to indicate beef liver is the best choice) or commercial tropical fish food nuggets, or Ivory soap.

If you are using an item such as fish food or dry pet foods, you can always enclose it in a zipper seal food storage bag into which a few holes have been poked. This will allow it to dissolve and seep out to attract the minnows while keeping the food itself in the bag to reduce the rate of dissolving and keep it less messy.

For commercial traps that you can purchase, you can just put which ever bait you choose, into the trap in the manner in which the instructions state. For the home made soda bottle trap, the best way to bait it is to push the bait into the opening of the open bottle. You really don’t need much, but it will allow the scent to seep out into the water and attract the minnows. Once the minnows swim through the top bottle, which will act as a funnel, they will be trapped in the bottom and unable to swim out.

White perch are not quite as popular as the yellow perch but they are still common. The white perch can be distinguished by their silvery color and irregular dark longitudinal lines that run all along its body. They have small teeth and a lower jaw that projects slightly.

There will be three spines on their anal fin and the dorsal fins are separate. The average weight for the white perch is one pound or under and they average between seven and ten inches in length. However, there have been white perch caught that measured up to nineteen inches.

White perch are most abundant in the Chesapeake Bay all along the Hudson River. They can also be found in many of the Maryland’s largest reservoirs. The white perch are predaceous carnivores and bottom oriented fish. The smaller ones eat insects, zooplankton and small crustaceans and as they mature they feed on shrimp, crabs, larval insects, worms, small fish and fish eggs belonging to other species.

Catching white crab is fairly easy and does not require any expensive equipment. All you need is a quality rod and reel and the basic gear and you are ready to get started. Fishing for white perch is easy but knowing a little about this particular species can help to make your trips a little more productive.

Basic Information about White Perch

White perch spawn in waters that are considered to be low salinity or freshwater. They prefer to find waters with a sandy or fine gravel bottom if possible. They begin spawning in April and it usually last on into the month of June. Females can produce anywhere between 50,000 eggs up to 150,000 eggs over a period of ten to twenty-one days. The eggs normally hatch between one to six days after they have been fertilized.

A male perch is usually mature by the time it reaches age two and the female by the time it reaches age three. The average white perch lives approximately nine to ten years. During the first year the young white perch stay close to the shore and just downstream from the spawning area. The adults will live in open waters and during the winter they travel to deeper channels.

White Perch Fishing Tips

White perch prefer the brackish waters that you will find in bays, rivers and creeks. It is best to use small bait when fishing for white perch. The best baits to use are bloodworms, shrimp, minnows, earthworms and so forth. Use small pieces of bait when fishing for white perch or you may lose your bait to a sneaky fish. You can also use artificial lures and flies to fish for white perch. The shiny lures will usually get you the best results so spoons and metallic plastic minnows are always a great choice.

The white perch will live in rivers and lakes even though they prefer the low-salinity estuaries. They are a semi-anadromous and will migrate from the brackish estuaries where they spend most of their time to the freshwater of rivers in the spring to spawn.

When it comes to fishing, there are many types of fish out there to keep the angler happy and busy. One favorite of avid anglers is the perch. They are most sought after for their delicious flavor but they also pose a challenge to catch so many sport fishermen love them for this reason. Perch fishing is a great way for families to spend time together because they are easy even for children to catch. Due to their smaller size most children can reel them in easy by themselves.

Before you can set out fishing for perch of your own, it helps to know as much as possible about the type of perch, the conditions they enjoy and what the best methods of catching them are. Here’s some information to get you started.

Different Types of Perch

There are many different types of perch. Some of them include:

Yellow perch

Ringed perch

Sun perch

Black perch

Perch are only about 7-9 inches in length and are typically only caught for the purpose of eating because of their delicious taste. Some of the best places in the United States to fish for perch are the Great Lakes, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and even Kansas, Utah, Iowa and Indiana. Perch are also found in bodies of water in Canada.

Some of the best places within these bodies of water to find perch are harbors, boat docks, breakwaters and also inland lakes. You will have the best luck when fishing for perch near the bottom of the water because this is where they tend to stay the most. However, occasionally they can be found in any depth depending on where you are fishing. Perch travel in groups or schools and do move around a lot even though they will usually stay close to their home area.

How to Catch Perch

If you want to know how to catch perch, you need to treat it just like any other type of fish. It’s important to know where the fish are, what bait to use and what types of other equipment to use.

So when it comes to using bait to catch your perch, what should you go for? Some of the best baits to use to catch perch include small minnows, insects and worms. Minnows and insects normally work the best when you are trolling for perch or drift-fishing. It really doesn’t matter which bait you use because perch will strike at just about anything so, it’s up to the individual fisherman and what they prefer to use. You can also use artificial bait as long as it is presented correctly but many anglers say they usually have better luck with live bait.

The perch is a heavy striker especially when they are really hungry so most any type of bait will attract them. However, you will find that when fishing for perch with artificial lures, the three-ways, leadheads, jigheads and spinner- rigs are the most popular tackle to use because they seem to get best results.