![]() ![]() Side-scanning electronics enable anglers to see the bottom and the small, round circles that indicate underwater bluegill beds.īluegills prefer to nest on hard bottoms. Because you may experience some difficulty getting your bait down in these regions, if the lake has current running through it, add a split shot up the line away from the bait. You also can take bluegills deep on the downcurrent side of these old dams’ wingwalls and barge canals. You can catch bluegills on the tops of these underwater locks and dams when the fish move closer to the surface and feed on the lip of the break. Quality lake maps will show the positions of these old locks and dams. The inundation of old river systems that had locks and dams on them has formed many lakes throughout the nation. You also can change to live bait and fish vertically in deep water. Use a depth finder to find brush, and you may catch bluegills there in 10 – 15 feet of water. However, barge channels have rocks extending well away from the surface rocks where you also can catch bluegills. Anglers sometimes only fish in the first five feet of water out from the rocks. Casting to the rip-rap with Beetle Spins, squirrel-tailed jigs and small rubber jigs like the Keystone Minnow, and bouncing them off the rocks will catch bluegills. Large riprap with holes and crevices often line a barge canal’s edges where bluegills will hold. By using light line, little jigs or live bait and a small shot lead, you can entice bluegills to leave the rocks and attack your bait as it free falls from the surface to the bottom. When scuba diving, I often see good concentrations of bluegills holding in the holes and depressions under and around the rock piles. Rock PilesĪround locks and dams, you can pinpoint visible and/or underwater rock piles in front of the flood gates from the surface or with a depth finder. The water then will home fewer bluegills – but they will be bigger.”Ĭatching bluegills like this is easier today than ever before due to new and better electronics. By increasing the number of prey fish in a body of water, you ensure that only a very-small number of bluegill offspring will survive, providing more food for the adults. “If you have low numbers of bluegills, then they have more food available and can grow to a larger size. “To catch trophy bluegills, the best place to start is a farm pond that’s heavily fertilized and has a crowded bass population,” explained my friend, Sam Spencer, once the Chief of Fisheries for the State of Alabama. How to Catch Bluegill and Target Areas to Focus On Farm Ponds ![]() Historically clean banks have been more productive than grass beds for bluegills. By the end of June in the South, many of the larger bluegills have moved to their deep-water haunts to spend the summer, the fall and the winter, before migrating back into shallow water to spawn in the spring. ![]() When the bluegills pull off their beds in the spring, they’ll move out to 10 feet of water and hold on rocks, riprap and bridge pilings. Thanks to this advantage of better sonar, anglers also are pinpointing bluegill beds where they’ve never located them before. Many bluegill fishermen have learned that if they can locate bluegill beds and mark those spots as waypoints on their GPS receivers, they can return to those sites each year and generally catch bluegills. Several modern devices will help you catch more bluegills, including depth finders and GPS receivers. But I never knew a better fisherman or hunter, and I always followed his outdoor advice, especially when it came to picking the best bait for bluegill and bream fishing. This wise, older outdoorsman never went to high school, trade school or college. Once you hook a bluegill, it will run for deep water and away from the bluegills on the more-shallow beds, spooking the bluegills further from the shore,” he said. When you’re picking bluegills off a bed, begin on the outside beds first, and work your way into the centers. That way you won’t knock off any of the bolls. “You start picking cotton on the plant’s outside first and then work your way into the bolls closest to the stem. “To catch the most and the biggest bluegills from any bed, you must pick bluegills just like you pick cotton,” Nathaniel Davis, an elderly outdoor friend who helped me learn to hunt and fish, told me years ago. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |