Thread: They are appropriately named ...

Occasionally I have had gills grabbed by bass while being reeled in, however, both gills and bass had been considerably smaller and never saw any physical damage from the attacks. Had this decent gill within a few feet of shore today when it was grabbed by a really large LMB. He went down into the rip rap of the dam which has a lot of heavy vegetation mixed in, instead of heading out into open water. I would say he was in that area for 5 minutes occasionally taking line and wasn't sure if he was hung up or not but couldn't move him much. He must have broke the vegetation free because he surfaced around 15 yds. out and a large clump of vegetation was on the line half way between us. At this point I was thinking maybe I'll be able to land this fish cause he appeared somewhat wore down from fighting the combination of both the rod and weeds together. He was facing away from me and all I remember is watching those big red gills flaring in and out from the back. Boy was I wrong! He made a drag screaming run out into open water and just like that he was able to dislodge the gill. Slowly reeled in and the weeds slid down and caught on the gill still firmly hooked on that #0 Mepps spinner w/1" tube trailer. Pic #1 left side shows most damage done. Eye was already completely clouded over and considerable bruising on side. Second pic is right side and shows slight bruise on side. Swam off slowly in pretty bad shape, hope he can recover. Would have loved to have been able to snap a pic of him with that good size gill lodged in that big mouth.

It's quite the blast when this happens. I've been lucky enough to pull in a few bass this way. I've also used larger bait hooks to hook up a smaller gill (I caught on the UL rig) on a bass rig and cast 'em back out. This has yielded a few large bass and several catfish.