Thread: big bluegill in short hot water ?

Thank you! I appreciate it!

I love to fish for crappie, walleye, and catfish but there is nothing more FUN than tossing a topwater or a dry fly into a bream bed. Those things are super aggressive. Hard fighters for their size as well. That's about the only use for a fly rod that I have, and there are trout waters here. I prefer spinning rigs for trout.

2 years ago my FIL and I went offshore fishing out of Pensacola. Our guide put us on some reefs and we found a few red and vermillion snapper, but nothing big and no big numbers. So we got to talking while waiting on a bite and we mentioned that we do some bream fishing back home. Guide asks us how that is, of course my FIL mentioned that it's just action packed but the fish generally aren't very big. Ok, guy says, we're gonna change things up a little. We had some live minnows but were using a jig of some sort, so we tied up some minnows on a chicken rig and went after em. I can't say how many we got but the triggerfish couldn't be missed, it's almost as if there were a few million of them down there. Those are like Bream. Tons of them, they are colonial, easy to catch, and HARD fighters. After about 10 of them I was worn out. My rig had two hooks on it and it wasn't uncommon to catch two triggers on one cast. Talk about getting a workout. Good eating too!

if ya ever get the chance to fish offshore, DO IT. it's a completely different experience, and you'll want to throw the freshwater rigs in the trash because of how many fish can be caught. We got tired before we ever limited out. FIL was done after about 5 or 6 of them, I got maybe a dozen. Hung one red snapper that went 33 lbs. IIRC the record is around 50lb, so I wasn't even close but my goodness, the amount of strength that those fish have is out of this world. Pulled him in from 102 FOW, dropped minnow on the reef and started to reel up and then the rod bent over and about pulled me overboard with it.