My biggest perch

This week seems to be the weeks of the biggest fish in my family. My eldest son caught his biggest carp, followed by my next son who caught his first (and biggest) eel, followed by the next one that caught his first (and biggest) channel catfish.

Yesterday was my turn. I headed out to fish the St Lawrence River, trolling a spot I found a few weeks ago. Started of trolling shallow for pike, but all we hit were some mid sized smallmouth bass. We switched to a deeper section of the river, and I tied on a Rapala countdown (CD 9). It got hit within a few minutes. As I was bringing in the fish, I thought it was a small walleye, turned out to be a monster 13 inch perch that weighed in at 1.2 lbs.



The weird thing about this perch, was that it looked like some sort of mutant. The black bars on it's sides were almost non existent, nor did it have the telltale hump on it's back like most Jumbo perch. It seemed to have a pink roe sack coming out of it, even though perch roe is normally yellow, and the perch spawned a long time ago.

My fishing buddy thought it might be a hybrid crossed with a smallmouth bass, but that didn't make any sense to me. I can't imagine two fish that are that different from each other getting crossed. To me, it was just a mutant "monster".