No Cane Poles Allowed

Bluegills as the Key to Tournament-Winning Bass Catches

By Pete Robbins

Reproduced with the exclusive permission of Bass West Magazine, Please Click on the Bass West Enhanced banner to subscribe.

Like most anglers, Elite Series pro Dave Wolak caught hundreds of bluegills and other panfish as a young boy. Eventually, he turned his attention to bass – after all, they’re bigger and that’s where the money is, right?

Well, sort of.

Wolak put himself squarely on the national radar screen by winning the 2006 Bassmaster American on Lake Wylie. While the 20 bass he weighed in to outlast big hitters like KVD, Gerald Swindle, Mark Menendez and Jason Quinn may have been the direct reason for his win, he never would have cashed the $253,000 check were it not for the clues provided by the semi-lowly bluegill.

Wolak locked in on bluegill spawning areas to pinpoint the location of his winning limits of bass. So did most of the other top finishers, and while it’s a pattern that can be pursued every year virtually everywhere that bass swim, most of the pros aren’t talking about it. The following is a breakdown of how you can locate and exploit this key pattern on a lake near you.

Interspecies Interaction

“Bass and bluegills depend on each other,” said former Bassmaster Classic champion and fisheries biologist Ken Cook. “And this bite happens anywhere bluegills live. They’re colony spawners. It happens with other species of sunfish, too, like red ears and shellcrackers, but they’re usually a little bit deeper and harder to locate.”

The pattern usually develops when the water temperature approaches the 70 degree mark. At that point, most of the bass are off the nests and the bluegills move into the same areas to pursue their own reproductive efforts. But while the bass have somewhat recovered from the spawn and want to feed up, their smaller counterparts are preoccupied and weak.

“The bass will sit just at the edge of visibility,” Cook continued. “If it’s an inside grassline, so much the better. But they’re waiting for the stragglers that aren’t paying attention.”

Louisiana’s Greg Hackney agreed: “Those male bluegill go through the same rigors of spawning as the bass. They don’t eat. They’re fairly beat up, but they’re overaggressive so they don’t leave (the nests).”

More importantly, Hackney added, the bass in the areas tend to be the outsized members of the species. Depending on the lake, that could mean 5-pounders or it could mean 8-pounders, but no matter what the bluegills are easy pickings that pack a massive nutritional punch.

How to Find Them

If you know where the bass spawn on your home body of water, then it shouldn’t be terribly hard to figure out where the bluegill beds will be – usually they’re the same areas. But if it’s a lake you’re not as familiar with, Cook said the key is to hunt down “protected areas with a hard bottom.” If the water along the shoreline is clear enough, he’ll put the trolling motor on high and go down the bank until he finds what looks like a field of moon craters. If the males are guarding the nests, the big bulls will typically be plainly visible.

But just because you don’t see bass in the beds, don’t assume they’re not there. Hackney believes that the biggest bass are opportunistic. They tend to stay on the outskirts of the colony and swoop in when they find the bluegills off guard.

“If you see the fish, they won’t be in the bed, they’ll be outside of it,” he said. “So you want to throw into the bed and fish out. Even when they’re not actively feeding, they still hang around the beds.”

While visually locating the beds is the easiest and quickest way to run this pattern, it’s not always the most effective. In fact, when Hackney determines that this pattern is in effect, he assumes that other anglers will have found it too, so he tries to find bedding areas that aren’t quite as noticeable.

“In dirty water, not as many people will find them,” he stated. “There usually still has to be enough visibility to see something, usually craters with black spots, but any time you see one anywhere, you can duplicate it – that type of bank or that type of bottom. Just remember, they usually need some sort of protection, a boat dock, a pocket or an overhanging tree. You’ll rarely find them on the main lake. But when you get in them, even a small nest will have 50 bluegills. You’ll be able to drag a jig or a Carolina rig and get a brim bite every time you drag it through the area.”

Not Always Easy Pickings

Just because you’ve located bluegill beds and know that there are feeding bass in the vicinity, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be easy to catch. Even though the bass are looking for an easy and filling meal, the fact that they’re in shallow, usually relatively clear water, means that they’re likely to be spooky.

“The goal is to know where the brim are and make long casts so as not to alert the fish to your presence,” Cook cautioned. For that reason, he’ll spend his practice period locating as many bluegill spawning areas as possible and marking them on his GPS, thereby establishing a milk run. He’s not the type to camp out on a single spawning area, either. “Usually after catching one or two you’re done for that spot,” he said. “So move around and rest them and then come back later.”

Hackney agreed: “You have to fish a lot of beds to do it, but if I find any of it, I will fish that way all day. You don’t get a lot of bites, but they’re big bites. And any time you see one anywhere, you can duplicate it. Either find that type of bank or that type of bottom and they’ll be there.”

Triggering the Strike

Wolak won the Bassmaster American largely on a finesse worm, and a small worm or soft stickbait can be a key way to tempt reluctant biters, but quite often the bedding bluegill pattern lends itself to power fishing and heart-stopping strikes.

“A lot of times they’ll eat a topwater all day long,” Hackney said. “A popper works real well and (at Wylie) KVD caught them on a bullfrog-colored spook.”

Cook’s go-to topwater is a Chug Bug, but he also dotes on a Rapala Skitter Prop, “especially when the water is real calm,” he said.

Indeed, anglers throughout the Carolinas have long viewed prop baits as a particularly effective way to generate brutal strikes. For many years the Brian’s Bee prop lure, painted in colors representing a bluegill, has been one of the secret lures of top pros. Only when anglers including Mike Surman, Clark Wendlandt and Bryan Thrift used it to garner top five finishes in the FLW Championship did its popularity spread. In addition to having props fore and aft, the topwater plug has the deep-bellied profile of a panfish – while it could be mistaken for a shad or other thinner forage fish, it more clearly represents a panfish, and that explains its effectiveness. Lucky Craft’s Kelly J has a similar appearance. Hackney said that just because the fish are hungry and aggressive doesn’t mean they’ll bite indiscriminately. “The lure needs to fit the profile,” he said, so if one topwater isn’t getting the strikes, don’t hesitate to switch to another.

When fish won’t break the surface to take a bait, there are still other ways to entice them. Hackney will often swim a natural-colored jig around bluegill bedding areas. In dirtier water, he said that a square-billed crankbait can be deadly. But the phenomenon that has changed the game, particularly when big bass are in the area, is the rise of bluegill-patterned swimbaits.

Historically, full-sized bluegill imitators like the Matt Lures Ultimate Bluegill and the Black Dog Baits Shellcracker have been deadly, even in areas where 8- and 10-pound bass aren’t found in large numbers. River rat Eddie Dillon of Columbia, Maryland, who calls the Susquehanna and Potomac Rivers his home base, will often start off with the Matt Lures products when he’s chasing the bluegill spawn. “You just slow-roll it through the areas and when that tail gets kicking they eat it,” he said. “I’ve caught 2-pound fish with the big 5-inch bait.” Even when truly big fish are not around, it’s a way to generate strikes from the biggest fish around. He throws the big baits on a heavy action flipping stick. In clear water, he favors 20-pound monofilament, but in stained water he’ll upgrade to 50-pound braid.

In recent years, the market has been flooded with a series of smaller panfish imitators, like the Tru-Tungsten Tru-Life Shad, the Reaction Strike rEVOLUTION Bluegill and the Jackall Giron. It might seem odd that a smaller lure would be attractive when it’s the sexually mature male bluegills that guard the beds, but Cook explained that even though the non-mature males aren’t directly engaged in the spawning process, they still tend to hover around the edges of the spawning areas, making them an easy meal for an opportunistic bass.

Dillon said the multi-segmented rEVOLUTION Bluegill, fished on a spinnerbait rod and 15 pound test P-Line monofilament, has been “phenomenal” for him throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Hackney agreed that these smaller baits, like the jointed Tru-Life Shad, are ideal for tournament situations. “They’re great for fish from 3 to 6 pounds, but they’ll catch a giant also,” he said. When he flings the Tru-Life Shad, he favors his signature series Quantum flipping stick, which is 7’11”, “but it has a light tip for a flipping stick, which allows me to throw more accurately around docks and trees. It’s perfect for baits up to 2 ounces.” He uses 20 lb. Cajun line (“never lighter”) in clear water and will go up to 50 or 65-pound Cajun braid if he can get away with it. He also stressed that a 5:1 gear ratio reel is preferable because the bass are looking for an easy meal and “it’s possible to retrieve over-fast on a faster reel.”

They Keep on Coming

Once you’ve discovered where the panfish spawn on your local lake, it’s not a “one and done” pattern. Indeed, both Cook and Hackney said that the places where you caught them a week ago, or even a month ago, are likely to continue to produce bass.

“It can last six weeks,” Cook explained. “The waves come and go but once you locate a good area, you can count on it being loaded for a month.”

Of course, the exact time of year that it happens varies depending on geography. “The majority here (in Louisiana) have finished by the end of March,” Hackney said. But the Wylie tournament that Wolak won occurred in the heart of summer, and it was a lake-wide phenomenon. Menendez and VanDam keyed in on the same bite, as did Hackney, who finished 13th.

You may consider chasing bluegills to be child’s play, an easy way to get a lot of bites in a short time, but no way to make a name for yourself on the major tournament circuits. But if you enjoy power fishing for aggressive bass, often the biggest fish on your local waterways, then you owe it to yourself to understand the seasonal migrations of bluegills. This is an “in-between” bite that you can’t afford to miss.

The shallow water thrills of the bass spawn may be largely completed, but before the fish head out to their deepwater summer haunts, they need to fatten up on the easiest prey around. In many cases, that diet consists of their smaller brethren, the bluegill. In fact, even after a majority of the fish have headed out to deeper structure, this is a bite that can persist throughout the summer months, and one you can have all to yourself.

What are you waiting for? Start looking.