Sarley: How the most memorable perch I ever caught came up just short

Back to my tale about the most memorable fish I ever caught. I apologize for having my brain taken over by the NFL draft last week.

My group had caught a limit of 45 monster perch.

The largest I had caught was estimated at 1.75 pounds by Captain Bob Jenkins. Two pounds is the magic number when it comes to declaring a perch to be a monster. I actually thought my fish might be near that weight.

We split the fish up and went our separate ways. I didn’t realize that Spence Petros had accidentally taken my giant fish until he called me at 2:30 that afternoon to tell me. He said: “I was getting ready to clean these fish and decided to weigh one of the large ones on my wife’s electronic kitchen scale. It came to be a pound and a half exactly.”

“Then I noticed that I had your huge fish in the cooler. I put that one on the scale and it read 2 pounds, 4 ounces. What do you want me to do with it?”

I was stunned. The Illinois record perch weighed 2.875 pounds and was caught on a private pond. I wasn’t close to that, but I knew that there had been very few fish that weighed 2 pounds or more taken from Lake Michigan.

I called Chicago’s Ken Schneider who has a beautiful 2-pound, 0½-ounce fish hanging on his wall. He told me that only five perch had ever been reported as weighing 2 pounds or more out of Lake Michigan in both Illinois and Indiana. He said the heaviest weighed 2 pounds, 2 ounces. I was flabbergasted. Could I possibly be the angler who caught the largest Lake Michigan perch? Schneider advised me to have it weighed on a certified scale.

I called Petros and asked if he’d have it weighed at a post office or a butcher shop. He said he would take it to a grocer right away. I then prematurely called Doug Petrousek from Douglas Taxidermy. Doug is the best taxidermist in the business and I asked him what it would cost me for the mount.

I waited for Petros’ call in a state of total anxiety. Finally, the phone rang. Spence told me he went to the store and weighed it on two scales in the produce department and they confirmed the 2-pounds, 4-ounces weight. He then took it to the butcher department.

Long story short — the butcher’s scale measured the jumbo perch’s weight at only 1.95 pounds. Five-one-hundredths of a pound short of the magical 2-pound weight. That is about a mere one-fifth of an ounce. I immediately fell into a state of depression. An analog scale would have rounded the weight up to 2 pounds.

Spence asked me what I wanted him to do with the fish. I replied, “Cut it up and enjoy a nice dinner.” I then dialed Douglas and told him not to wait for me as I would not be bringing him a fish to ply his artistry on.

In retrospect, I am sorry that I didn’t head in to the dock to have it weighed immediately after landing it. It sat in a cooler for over seven hours. A fish can lose 10% of its weight that way. My perch burped up three gobies while I photographed it, more weight loss. I also learned that fish filled with spawn should be plugged, in order to keep the eggs inside the fish. There was a decent number of fish eggs in the bottom of our cooler when I emptied it.

Oh well, it was still a great fish — a fish of my lifetime, to be sure. I swear in my heart that my fish, if handled correctly would have weighed over the magic number of 2 pounds. What do they say, coulda, woulda, shoulda?

If you are thinking that you can copy my experience and hit the mouth of Waukegan Harbor for a monster perch, forget about it. For some reason, the jumbo perch have never gone back to lay eggs in that location. For the life of me, I do not know where they have gone.

• Daily Herald Outdoors columnist Steve Sarley can be reached at sarfishing@yahoo.com.