Sorry about the poor quality pictures but the kids were excited, and I was trying to get a cell phone picture.
We had been researching a place for our family to vacation and found a place about 60 miles north of Grand Rapids on a 250 acre (smallish) lake called Diamond Lake. It is shallow, heavy peat bottom, weedy, and only one small area where it reaches 25 feet. In the facebook pictures from the resort there was a picture of a large RES that was caught. I was curious when I got here if there would be any we could catch. Today the kids caught about 6-8 very nice RES. They have a darker coloration due to brown bottom, brown weeds where they seemed to stay. You can see the dark colored bottom in the picture. It was only about 6 feet of water, lots of weeds, hard to think they were in there and I saw no spawning beds around even in the sandy shallows. We caught several typical bluegill also with more typical coloration.
I don't know if the bottom shots will show up and I think of the 4-5 we caught most seemed to be male. Very pretty dark red spots on ear tabs and urogenital pore quite small.
Since this is a shallow lake, 60 miles north of Grand Rapids, and very likely to struggle with winter kill it is encouraging to know that the RES population survives. I don't see this lake on the list of DNR lakes that they stocked them in but somehow they go there and are making it.
They bit on a worm under a bobber and you had to have the worm right in the middle of the weeds. Any further out in the open and they wouldn't budge to go get it.
