Why am I on dinks while the guy 200 m (656 ft) away fills a bucket with jumbos?
Because small perch and jumbos live on different real estate even when they share a lake. Small fish carpet the weedy flats in 2–6 m (6–20 ft), grazing soft-bottom invertebrates; jumbos run deeper on average — 6–12 m (20–40 ft) — in smaller, more mobile schools glued to protein-rich hard bottom: shell beds, gravel, and in Great Lakes-connected waters the goby-and-mussel lawns. The two size classes may use the same flat and never mix. The bucket-filler is not luckier; he is on harder, deeper bottom. Sonar that shows bottom hardness, or simply feeling gravel versus mud through the rod, finds the divide.
The full story
This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
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