Fish Id: A Guide To East Coast Fishes

White Perch  Morone americana

Coloration silver white, darker back. Average size around 1/2 - 1 lb. Flat and chunky shape, 9 spines on front dorsal, rear dorsal with 1 spine, 12 rays. Striped pattern similar on very small fish to that of the striped bass.  Brackish water fish, ranging from the river out to the bay.
Perch bait.

Have you ever heard of perch being caught in the ocean or in Grassy (that far away from river)?

A white perch is actually a FRESH WATER fish. Try looking them up in any salt water book. Not going to happen. I have never heard of a white perch in Grassy, even in the '70's and surely not in the ocean. They are extremely content in brackish/salt water conditions and must get to salt water to be able to spawn, hence why land locked lakes are void of white perch.

There is a silver perch that is a salt water species of fish, but I have never seen any numbers of those in our Great Bay area and not big ones either.

The cooler the water, ie: in winter, the further up the river the white perch seem to be found. In the spring, we do see some big fish at Graveling and in the mouth of the Mullica river, but it's the fall fishery that really produces numbers of nice fish in the mouth of the river. Early spring, the Bass River, Wading River, Lower Bank and Green Bank bridges produce nice numbers of white perch, indicating the mass of perch tend to be up river. As the season progresses into fall they are at the mouth of the river. Mid December to March, find them half way, holed up commonly under the ice in Collins Cove.

~Scott

Exerpt from a Nov. '96 bulletin:
The White Perch are back in the mouth of Mullica River again this week. It is hard to say why they come and go. Many times it seems that they are effected by the amount of fresh water flowing down the river from good quantities of rain. Last week, they were chased by pods of three pound bluefish that came and went. Fishing was real good for many anglers which meant they had several hours of fish cleaning to do. The Perch are plentiful enough for the anglers to throw back any fish that are not large enough to fillet. Top & bottom rigs with small #4 gold hooks are a good rig choice. Four hook Herring rigs worked well and provided reports of some triple headers. The bait of choice is still Bloodworms. As the water cools, the Perch start to change over to a preference for the live grass shrimp bait. The White Perch are best fished at anchor. It is necessary to search for perch on small bottom changes in the mouth of the Mullica River between Deep Point and Oyster Bed Point. Locating fish on the fish finders is 90% of the battle to be successful at catching Perch. The Perch also have had a feeding pattern this week. The best bite was during faster moving tidal currents. This means that they were caught on the incoming as well as the outgoing tides. The two hours of the slacker moving tides were not very productive.

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