can i come round for dinner please!!!!!

There were 9 Reds and 3 Crimson / Scarlet Perch between 5 of us from memory. Those of us that reached out individual limit carefully released another 4 or 5 reds before calling it a day and coming home. The three bigger fish at the bottom with the slightly redder underbelly are the scarlets. The reds were white under the belly.

As I mentiond in another post the difficulty of identifying your catch after ikijiming the scarlets had me chasing up the fish id books to make sure we didn't breach any individual bag limits. Whilst the head shape is slightly different and the eyes are a different colour and there is a dark patch on the tail wrist on the scarlets they look almost the exact same colour as the reds after both species have been ikijimied. The only fool proof way to make sure you correctly identify your reds is by the groove they have on the gill plates. Read and re-read the fisheries books guys and make sure you have one on board when you head up there, they are invaluable in my opinion. We stopped fishing for about 15 minutes at one stage whilst three of us read and re-read the little book before continuing on and ensuring we did in fact have scarlets / crimsons on board.

I had also downloaded and printed out all the Gascgoine Fisheries brochures before we left Perth and had them handy to make sure we stayed clear of any sanctuary zones and had up to date measurements for each species. Don't risk it with a hire boat as the stickers on our boat were out of date one side of the boat and current on the other.

And Street you are welcome to come over for dinner, just BYO fish mate (teeheehee)

Here is a link to a Queensland site that also mentions the confusion between Red Emporers and Scarlets.

http://www.sunfish.com.au/html/scarlet_sea_perch.html

Be very careful guys, just like we were, otherwise you could fall foul to a miscount / misidentification that could get you into some strife.

With so many of you heading up there in the next few weeks I thought it would pay to take a moment and post a few of these issues to make sure everyone is aware of the importance of correct identification in waters that you may not fish too regularly and where certain species look remarkably similar.