Quote Originally Posted by Dgonzo85 View Post
I was thinking that the smaller aberdeen hooks would be better to use since blue gills have small mouths.Are #6 aberdeen hooks small enough?The blue gills in the lake i fish are florida strain.
If a Bluegill is big enough to take the end of your pinkie finger in its mouth ... (provided you don't have huge hands .... LOL !! ) ... any hook size of #4 or smaller will work. You don't want too small of a hook, because then the fish can take it deep ... making extraction a problem. A good "hook disgorger", or long hemostats, is a good piece of equipment to have !

A very light weight sinker & small float would be my recommendation for using crickets. Bluegill have a tendancy to want to kill/dismember their food, before grabbing it & swimming off .... especially the smaller ones (< 8"). Those bigger ones are less "afraid" of injury from their foodsource ... so they're more likely to inhale the whole meal, rather than nip & tug on the extremities (legs/head).
In either event, you want to know the mood of the fish striking your bait .... and yet not give the fish any indication of tension/resistance against their movement ... and a small float will do that. Some people even go so far as to remove the "hopper" (back) legs from the cricket, before putting it on the hook. This keeps the smaller fish from grabbing a hind leg & jerking the cricket off the hook (or tearing the cricket up so bad that it can easily be sucked off the hook).

There is a downside to using a light weight/small float ... in that it takes longer for the sinker/bait to reach any depth, and smaller fish have a better shot at getting to it before it gets to the depth of any bigger ones. This is not so much a problem if bigger fish are shallow, or if fishing a spawning bed. But, if/when it is a problem ... or when fishing open water suspended fish ... I've found that using a #4 or #5 split-shot sinker, about 10-12" above the hook, and casting it out over the area & letting it swing back on a tight line, will usually get the bait past the shallower small fish & down to the depth of the larger ones, quicker. I've successfully used this very technique, on my home lake ... fishing over 80+ feet of water, when the bigger Bluegill are suspended at depths of > 12ft.

Fish are not "smart" enough to know that a cricket doesn't swim underwater, like a minnow ... they just know that it looks/smells like something they've eaten before, or they've deemed as "food", so they give it a taste test. Your job is to be quick enough to set the hook, before the fish swallows the hook, or spits the bait out, or steals the bait off the hook .... LOL !!

... cp