Tips for Lake Washington Yellow Perch

[Parasite]

Thinking about going after yellow perch in Lake Washington this week for the first time. What tips do you guys recommend? General areas of the lake right now? Depth? Techniques? Bait? I'm used to fishing for them in the midwest using dropper rigs or bait under a bobber, so that's probably easy enough. However, I was talking to someone today how bait might be an issue. I'm used to using shiners, wigglers, waxworms, and maggots for bait. It does not like like I'll be able to do that here. So I'm guessing crickets? worms? cut bait (such as perch)? Any help is appreciated.

[Mfowl]

Weed lines in 15-25fow. a small piece of crawler or micro jig will start to get them. Transition to small chunks of perch meat. Don't hesitate to move if the fish you find are smaller size. They seem to school in size/age class. Keeping moving til you find the bigger fish. They will be on the weed lines until late summer when they start to school in deep water. Drop shotting tandem hook bait rigs works well. They are plentiful and once you locate them you can stack them up fast. Have fun out there!

[Brushcrawler]

Everything Mfowl said is spot on. Worms to get started perch strips after that.

[Parasite]

Perfect. This should be easy to figure out as long as my Sonar doesn't short out again.

[jdb]

Can they be caught from the bank?

[Mfowl]

Can they be caught from the bank?

They can definitely be caught from the many public docks around the lake. However the docks can get crowded. Especially in the evening time. Biggest problem from the bank is that almost the entire lake is lined with milfoil from about 6-15+fow. Hard to fish through it. I suppose you could try jig/bait under a bobber but I have not done that personally.

[Mfowl]

If anyone is interested, the perch are on fire in Lake Washington right now. We kept 15 fryers in about 40min of trolling small plugs off the weed line. Didn't even need bait. Started about 10:30 and fished until 3:30 mostly trolling for bass. Got about 10 up to 3lbs. Lots of floating weeds/debris to clean off your line periodically. Would be a fun time for kids!