Hybrid Bluegill and uneducated Bass

[Cardinal]

Last night a friend took me fishing on a private pond stocked with hybrid bluegill and bass. WOW! I lost track of the number of bg's we caught but they were huge. I have a large hand and it was all I could do to hold the top fin and bottom at the same time. At one time I had 8 casts where I caught a bg on one cast. They fought just like the little ones but with a lot more weight. It was like the difference between a coffee saucer and a dinner plate. I used a yellow foam spider with purple legs until on the the bg's swallowed it. I then went with a black foam spider with a white poly indicator on top until it too was swallowed. There was a lot of algae on the pond so floating flies was the only way to keep from fouling with algae. I then tied on a larger ( size 8 ) white foam spider and the bg's went wild. I would cast it out and as soon as it hit the water would be grabbed. Normally for me the bg's kind of kiss the fly. ( Kissing noise ) but last night they were grabbing with a big splash. I've never seen bg's so aggressive. My friend wanted to learn to fly fish. He had a sweet casting rod. I cast it out for him to show him how to do it and immediately he had a bg on. I left him to his own devices and was catching as fast as I could release them. My friend was using a vertical weed whacker on the weeds behind him. He got better over the 1 1/2 hour we fished, but finally went back to a rattling, swishing pig boat with a spinner when the bass moved in. I must admit he caught 4-5 bass on that rig. I changed to a dahlberg diver tied with pink flash and red feather tails ( it looked like a fish trailing entrails ) and caught one ten inch bass with that before it got waterlogged. The algae was 10-15 out from shore so we had to cast at least 20 feet to get beyond it. I then tied on one of the first deer hair sliders in yellow and black I had tied ( last year ) that was pretty loose on the hair. Even so I caught a 14 inch bass on it. It then got so soggy that when I cast it, it sounded like a wet rag when it hit the water. My only regret of the whole evening was that my friend had better luck with that spinning rig. Not that it bothers me that he caught more but I was hoping that in such an environment the deer hair poppers would do as well as a spinning rod. I may have just been too hyped up to let it sit as long as it needed before twitching it. I will admit, that is a problem I have with fly fishing in general, it is so fun to do, it is hard for me just to sit like a bobber-bopper. Pardon the length and this is not really a boast ( I'm sure good fishermen would have done better ) but I have never had such big fish hit so often on such a simple fly and then the bass on those deer hair diver and slider. Every now and then it is great fun to go catching instead of fishing.

[okflyfisher]

Sounds like a hoot.

[Jim Hatch]

Hey Cardinal,

You have stumbled onto the reason I fish
warm waters almost exclusively and why the
bluegills and red eared sunfish are such a
favorite. When they are on and the planets
are in the proper position and your holding
your mouth just right, nothing compares.*G*
Springtime pan fishing is the highlight of
my whole year.*G* Warm regards, Jim

P.S. There is a good reason why I keep a
box of my #8 "White Widow" foam spiders
in my tackle bag in spring. Hard to beat!

[This message has been edited by Jim Hatch (edited 03 May 2006).]

[zzdruid]

the best fun you can have is gills in an aggresive mood.

[meadowlark2]

Cardinal,

Sounds like a great time!

I'm interested in hearing more details about the Hybrid Blue Gill (HBG), if you don't mind.


Do you know how long they have been in the pond? How large is the pond? Did the LMB look healthy and well fed? Was there noticable small green sunfish looking fish also present?

I'm in the process of evaluating the HBG against some of the marketing claims for them and would like to have your observations or anyone else's observation about them in ponds. My "experiment" is only about 6 months old, but it has clearly shown that HBG are very rapid growers and also very aggressive fish.

If interested, you can read about the experiment thus far at:
[url=http://www.meadowlarkponds.com/TGG.htm:dbbd0]http://www.meadowlarkponds.com/TGG.htm[/url:dbbd0]

Thanks.

[Cardinal]

The lake was 4-5 acres. I do not know how long the hbg have been in there. I looked for fry on the shoreline where I was fishing but there was a lot of algae and I was soon engaged in the hbg so I cannot say I looked very close. The hbg have sharper spines, although that could just be a function of their size. My best guess to weight is about 1 1/2 lbs. but that is a real guess. I did not weigh any. Back to stomach would be 6 inches, head to tail probably 10 inches or more. Most had a yellow blush on but one had a blue blush. They were very aggressive on the white foam spider. There were very few times that they hit it first and then came back. The pond is in the middle of a pasture. I stopped fishing for the bg's when the bass started moving into the shallows. I caught a 10 inch that looked in good shape, and then a 14 inch 1 1/2 lb LM that was in good shape. My friend caught about 5-6 bass with a spinning rig. Most were in the 12 inch range. They appeared healthy to me and there was a lot of surface activity including air jumps across the pond as night fell. Sorry for the estimates, we should have had a camera but once the action started I was concentrating on other things.