Icing Bountiful Bluegills!

Chasing panfish throughout the winter months can represent some of the best action of the entire year. Bluegill in particular are comparatively willing biters throughout most of season and with a simple selection of artificial soft plastic baits, a few small ice-jigs and a good sonar unit, catching them consistently is pretty easy. Best of all, if you live anywhere within the bluegill's range it can be hard to find a piece of water that doesn't have an abundance of these critters.Different lake types often dictate locational preferences; good fishing on shallower, weedy lakes with extensive flats and lots of cover can be fantastic and you may never need to fish more than 10 or 12 feet of water. The flip side of that coin are deeper lakes where isolated basins or 45-degree banks adjacent to deep water are more productive and you might be fishing anywhere from 18 to 30 feet of water. It can a take a bit of work and lots of holes over a few trips to determine bluegill preferences on a given water body, but once you find 'em those zones will produce year after year. Light action rods paired with size 10 or 15 spinning or in-line reels spooled with 2 - 4lb test fluorocarbon are ideal. A small selection of jigheads in both matching and contrasting colour patterns are all that are needed; keep hook sizes a bit on the smaller size (#10 being ideal, whereas a slightly bigger hook can be advantageous when targeting crappie or perch). I am biased and have strictly switched over to using Anglers Choice soft plastics; but for good reason - they flat out catch fish everywhere I go! In the early part of the season where I fish, using the diminutive 1.1" Wiggle Fry can be key, as the season progresses, we'll upsize throughout January using the 1.3" wiggle fry and ultimately using predominantly the Crappie Wiggler for the remainder of the season. The bottom line is I want to use the biggest bait I can so long as the fish are eating it... during frontal changes or periods of inactivity, using the smaller baits can be key to keep fish coming top-side. I can honestly say that I've caught fish on all the colours available and the key really for me is having a selection of different patterns to cycle through as bluegills often get accustomed to one particular colour eventually and a simple change up is often all that is required to fire them up again. If you predominantly fish for walleyes, whitefish, lakers or other larger fish through the winter months - grab a handful of soft plastics, a few small jigheads and give bluegillin' a shot - but be careful, the action can be totally addictive and might completely "ruin" the rest of your winter!!