Water and Wings

June is finally here and there isn’t a bet­ter month to do a lit­tle bluegill fish­ing. I usu­ally pre­fer bass fish­ing but there are time when catch­ing a mess of bluegill can be fun and tasty. It is also a per­fect type of fish­ing to get the kids lots of fun and easy action.　

Bluegills are one of our most com­mon lake and pond species found in Ohio and you couldn’t ask for a bet­ter fish for kids to chase after.　Sure, catch­ing a nice size bass is a thrill, but to young­sters with short atten­tion spans, bluegills offer a much bet­ter option.　

Catch­ing bluegills is very easy com­pared to most types of fish­ing and the action can be red hot when you find a school of them.　Con­stant action is a key when kids are along and bluegills are usu­ally will­ing to comply.

The best part about fish­ing for bluegills is that you can get by with inex­pen­sive equip­ment.　Using ultra-light rods and reels allows you to use smaller line and will increase your fun when fight­ing a bluegill, but my kids have caught tons of bluegills on their Snoopy poles when they were lit­tle tikes.　

You can also get along fine with cane poles but you don’t see those used too much any­more, at least not as much as when I was kid.　By far my favorite way to catch bluegills is with a fly rod because a nice sized gill and feel like a mon­ster on a fly rod.

Ultra-light gear is the pre­ferred method because you can use lighter line.　Using four to eight pound test line is the best choice.　If you are using live bait, which is the eas­i­est method for catch­ing bluegills, stay with the smaller hooks.　I pre­fer to use longer shanked hooks as they are eas­ier to remove from the small bluegill mouth, which can be dif­fi­cult at times espe­cially when they swal­low the entire bait and hook.　Add on a split shot sinker a few inches above the hook to keep it down and I rec­om­mend using a bob­ber to detect bites and more impor­tantly to pro­vide some weight to help with casting.　

A com­mon mis­take made in pan fish­ing is using too large of a bob­ber.　Try to get by with as small of a bob­ber as pos­si­ble.　Using a bob­ber that is too big can cause you to miss a lot of strikes and often a bluegill will grab the bait and feel that resis­tance of the heavy bob­ber and let go before you can set the hook.

As far as bait, there are lots of options but I pre­fer using live worms over any other choice.　They are easy to find and bluegills love them. The key is to only put on enough of the worm to cover the hook.　Any more than that and the bluegills will just sit there and nib­ble at your bait cre­at­ing lots of frus­tra­tion for you.　Crick­ets, meal worms, wax worms, grasshop­pers all work as well.　If you want to go the arti­fi­cial route, small spin­ners and small flies (both dry and wet) work fine as well.　

Find­ing bluegill is really easy in most ponds.　The eas­i­est time of the year to catch them is when they are spawn­ing. You can prac­ti­cally sight fish for them look­ing for their dish shaped nests in the shal­lows and usu­ally when you find one, you will find dozens. Dur­ing this time, they will attack any bait that enters their nest.　

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Jun 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.