Bluegill Afternoon

[Stan Wright]

Got a call from John.... so we grabbed our ultra-light fly rods and headed out for bluegill... great fishing... lots of bluegill action. We even got a few largemouth, peacocks, and red devils. The red devils were the larges of the fish we caught.

Spoke with Mike and they got a vew peacock bass... not much action on the larger peacock bass. They saw a lot of fish, but not on the beds and not interested in eating anything.

Water level is up almost 3 feet in the last few days so we had a hard time spotting spawning peacock bass.... even though the water was clear 3 to 4 foot visibility.
But mostly we were having so much fun catching bluegills we didn't look for the spawners.

[roadwarriorsvt]

Ya gotta catch whatever is biting! Has anyone heard of BG being way up the north fork? I'm gonna try for them up there this weekend.

[blast from the past]

In the 70's, bluegills were all over the place. Just everywhere! They were whoppers - like midsized tilapia. We would have to look around for the right "structure". We would catch them with bamboo pole - no "floater"(bobber) - just a tiny splitshot 12" about a number 8 bronze hook. On the hook we put a piece of earthworm. (You know, da kine you dig up from the backyard). We also would fabricate crude (but really fun) homemade flyrod and reel rigs by glueing flyrod snake guides (the cheap wire kind) onto bamboo poles and using some uncle's old flyline, or some found at the flea market or yardsale. We would wrap a lot of duck tape around the butt to make it heavy, and then coil about 20yards of the used flyline around the butt of the bamboo pole and just unfurl some off when we wanted to false cast and cast (forget backing....heck, forget the reel!). Simple 8lb. mono. was the leader. We didn't use flies - just the same hook with the piece of real worm on it. Worked every time!! The floating flyline acted like a bobber, we could see the line start to move across the surface in an odd way - that's when we knew the bluegill got the worm. The schools we would run into were incredible - at least 50 in one spot, like a piece of water right on the bank that was only the size of a 55-gallon drum. That's how it was. We would just throw 'em back in, so they could GROW (we wanted to see how large they could grow!) Then we'd come back and catch 'em. They would grow 3-4" in a single summer. We used to bring a breadbag of several (whoppers) back for the old lady in our neighborhood who loved to eat them. Blast from the Past!