Have I mentioned how much I love bluegill?

[ditchbanker]

Today was just warm enough to be one of the few days I've fly fished without my guides icing up. I called up my dad and we decided to not let cold weather keep us down and headed to a local pond. The bluegill at the pond were right where I've usually found them to be in the winter.

I know that bluegill have a stigma as being just a kid fish, but my dad and I had a great time. They're so stinking aggressive, they go for all kinds of flies. My dad was getting the bigger 'gills on nymphs slowly retrieved and I was getting a greater number of smaller fish with a surface fly and jerky retrieves. They fight great for their size, provide tons of action and reproduce so quickly that I had no moral problem with keeping all of the fish that were big enough to be worth dulling a knife on. We only kept 8 between us, but easily caught two dozen in a few hours. My wife brought our son down after his nap and he admired our catch.



And tomorrow night I get to enjoy



We also caught a couple little Large mouths that we didn't get any pictures of.

All in all, a pretty good day for January.
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[cpierce]

Those are some good sized bluegills. You can't beat them for fight or willingness to chase a fly. Nice local pond.

Great post![cool]
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[macfly55]

Great post.. and love the look on your sons face.. :-)... wonder if there is a future fly fishereman in the making there.. ??

MacFly [cool]
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[cpierce]

If I had some open water ponds with nice bluegill in them, I don't think you could get me to come back inside!

Are you in the Boise area?

I fished the river and some ponds there last February when I was there for a conference. Great area for winter fishing. Now that I am retired, I miss the traveling excuse!!
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[ditchbanker]

Yeah, I'm in the treasure valley. The only thing that makes me hit it a little less often (right now) is that all of the fish in the pond are pretty well centered around a very small area that brings in fresh water that must be warmer. After a couple hours of being there the bite really slowed down. I think a lot of it was that most of the fish in the pond had probably seen some evidence of our presence by then. I try not to overdo it and ruin it for someone else. I'm not sure how long it takes for them to calm down after they get hit hard. There are a lot of trout ponds in our area, and for some reason the warm water pond gets hit much less frequently. I guess wild bluegill, lmb and pumpkin seeds (we caught several of those too) aren't as exciting as planted rainbows. Go figure.
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[macfly55]

Ill take the wild fish over a plant any day... thats one of the reasons I like our vacation in TN in the summer... small stream fishing and you never are sue what is biting but generally something is... :-)

MacFly [cool]
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