Ky Lake redears

[chaunc]

Me and my buddy got on some big mommas this week. Lots of heavy crackers. Lake is way up but the fishin was great.






And we got some real nice gills too.

[redearhoosier]

Man, you've got some hog crackers there, a couple look like they go way over a pound. I went today and didn't do any good here in Indiana. I didn't even locate any nests, strange..

[redear]

there is a whole lot of them over a pound from the looks of the photos. tell us how you got on them chaunc. were they shallow? what kind of bait etc.

[blueultra2]

I could take you to a place right now and honestly put you on top of hundreds of red ears!! And it's a public lake!!

[M R Dux]

Great catch!

Not to be critical, I guess each to his own, but I still won't keep a female redear that I can positively ID. I figure it won't hurt the resource but it has always been mine and several friends policy. We started catching quality redears on KY/Barkley about 15 years ago and started releasing all we suspected as females then, hoping it would help the fishery. Looks like something has worked.

[Festus_Haggen]

Chaunc is a breamsweeper. I've fished the tailwaters of KY Lake, but never the lake itself.

We had one pond in my neck of the woods on state property-it was available to the public, and full of shellcrackers. Some nuts got together and decided it was best to drain the pond and put an industrial park nearby. Well, they drained the pond, then the fine folks that were gonna put a biodiesel plant there got caught for embezzlement and fraud. CLEAN HOUSE NEXT ELECTION!! All you had to do was throw a redworm or nightcrawler on the bottom, be patient, and you'd have a cracker in a few minutes. Averaged between 7-9 inches, not the biggest, but you'd get a 10 incher every now and then. You didn't have to worry about losing lures or getting hung up, either, and it was HEAVILY fished, and probably heavily stocked or managed. They stock rainbow trout in a stream only a few hundred yards away from the former pond site. I wouldn't be surprised they cut that out, too.

[buffalo13]

Have to agree with mrdux. I put the females back and just keep the males both bluegill and redear. Nice mess though. To each his own.

[Pat]

Nice catch , pretty color to them fish

[chaunc]

Fellas, i traveled 1200 miles round trip to get these fish. It's not like i'm going to hit them like this every day during the spawn and deplete the redear population on this lake. We took these fish out of one area and i'm sure it wont hurt the overall population.
You guys from the Benton area that get to fish them daily are blessed. Thanks for keeping the fishery going. I'll be back again, next year.

[chaunc]

there is a whole lot of them over a pound from the looks of the photos. tell us how you got on them chaunc. were they shallow? what kind of bait etc.

We fished outside of a weedline in a back bay. Water is 4ft higher than last year but the fish are bedding in the same area. We got the big girls out in deeper water as they were staging to come shallower. 7 to 9ft was best. We used black microspoons and fle flys, tipped with waxworms or mealworms, fished below a bobber. Got a lot of the gills on nibbles too. Water is stained so the dark color worked great.