Thread: Recent Slabs (Bluegills)

VERY nice gills you got there! Since you are asking about comments and advice on the 11" mark, here are mine, Find a local pond and start managing it for trophy gills, maybe even stock some hybrids if you want to go that route. Think about trying the coppernose bream which is not a hybrid, a little management, food and time you will be surprised at the outcome!

Wademaster, are you limiting yourself to your home state? If you're open to a little driving and don't mind a guide fee for a day, head over to middle TN next March and I can just about guarantee you'll catch one 11" or better in a day of fishing. You might beat 12"

Originally Posted by Alphahawk

I am very fortunate to be able to fish Laurel Hill Lake in TN. Ten inch Gills are quite common.......and 11 and 12 inch Gills are not really uncommon.


Regards

The Southern states seem to produce bigger fish than the Northern states on average. I think they have more food available year around than ours do. Michigan's record Bluegill came from Vaughn Lake, it weighed 2 lbs. 12 oz's. was 13 3/4" caught by Gary Sayler in 1983 Now that's a big one.

The biggest gills I ever caught were caught by mistake on LARGE MINNOWS while fishing for crappie and trying to weed out the dinks by upsizing my bait, though I do remember one on a spinnerbait for bass one year that blew my mind, if you want that 11 incher, I suggest you keep pushing for them and find yourself a nice secleuded farm pond somewhere

Nice gills. Try getting in on small farm ponds with deep water and lots of snails. My son and I fished a pond yesterday loaded with big blues. These things hit 10 times harder than the ones in the big lakes around here. We must have caught 30 or more, most 10' or better. We were useing half a red worm on a small hook under a wieghted bobber. The smaller rig worked great with cold water temps. Have you tried fishing with Spikes (grubs)? I was planning to use spikes but couldn't find any yesterday. In the colder months up here in NY, that's the one thing big blues love are Spikes on a ice jig under a small float. Good luck and have fun.

Wow. Talk of 2lb gills makes me wanna go fish right now. Actually I've been in Tennessee the last few days on vacation. And farm ponds are where im fishing mostly. They seem to grow bigger fish of all species most of the time on average.

I'd have to say that 10-inchers are not quite common in Laurel Hill. I've fished it several times myself, and have caught a few that size out of there over dozens of trips spread out over thirty years, but 7-8" is more the average size, and they make a big deal about a 10" gill - I check the Facebook page for the lake now and then, and they have two photos for all of this year of 10" bluegill, and no photos of an 11", certainly not a 12". I know that an 11" was caught out of there two or three years ago, but that was the first one I had seen that big out of the lake in years. 11" bluegill are hard to come by in public water these days, in my experience. They pop up every blue moon, but they're decidedly an anomaly - fishing for bluegill that size on public water is akin to hunting for a 14-point buck on public-access land. It may happen, but you're just about as likely to get hit by lightning. There's far too much fishing pressure, and the average level of angler awareness about trophy bluegill is about forty years behind what the awareness is for bass: most bluegill anglers, when they happen upon a bed of big 'gills, keep every big one they catch and think nothing of it. But there have been numerous studies by fisheries biologists (Illinois, Utah, etc.) in the past ten years that show beyond a doubt that removing numbers of larger bluegill from a lake permanently alters the genetic profile of the entire bluegill population of the lake, skewing it toward smaller fish. Until catch-and-release catches on with bluegill anglers, fishing for an 11" fish in public water is self-torture. There are a handful of public lakes around the country that somewhat regularly produce 'gills that size, but it's a small handful, and even those lakes are giving up fish that size a lot less regularly than they did even four years ago.

Private, intensively-managed lakes, on the other hand, produce this size fish much more often. The most notable lake, Richmond Mill in North Carolina, has numbers of bluegill over two pounds, has become famous for them; but it costs $1,000 a day to fish it, or $600 per person if you bring three other people with you. That lake has been stocked since 2005.

There are several private ponds in middle Tennessee that have been intensively managed since mid-2009 by yours truly, and which will likely give Richmond Mill a run for its money come next March. And you don't have to be a millionaire to afford to fish them

Thanks for the input. Give me some rates !!