Porpoising Bluegills

Fishing in the early morning hours, there are times that you see things that you may not during the rest of the day. We were out bass fishing recently in the early morning and the bass were cooperating quite well on the deeper weed lines.

There was little wind, so the water’s surface didn’t have much for ripples and while we were fishing, we started noticing that there were pods of fish swimming at the surface. Having seen this before, figured that these were schools of small bluegills and didn’t give it much thought.

One pod got very close to the boat and we noticed, these were some nice hunchbacks coming out of the water. Luckily we had one rod in the boat rigged and ready and my son cast out in front of one of these to see what the size was. You had to predict where to place the cast, as you couldn’t place it into the pod, as they would go down, but also not too far in front in case they turn.

Took him a couple of casts, but finally got the bait in their track that they were going. Fishing a Eurotackle Mummy Worm, 9 inches below a float, it didn’t take long and one of them took the bait. I thought that he had hooked a bass, as he was fighting a good fish.

When he got the fish near the boat, it was a large colorful bluegill and definitely had some shoulders to it. We haven’t seen this size of these in a long time and was great seeing that they are coming back. We put the bass rods down and spent some time catching these hard fighting fish.

For the size of a bluegill, they are some of the hardest fighting fish in freshwater. It was a fun time catching these fish and as the boat traffic started to get busier, these fish slid back to the lower depths and didn’t see them anymore. Definitely need to keep a couple of panfish rods in the boat at all times as we will be watching out for something like this again.