Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Hook Shy BGs????

The bass were biting today but I only caught a couple of bg. They were tough to get to bite a few weeks ago too. Is this common for summer? I cast netted and easily caught several 1-3inch bg so forage seemed good. The biggest bass is about 12.5" so I know there are a lot of bigger bg in there. Has anyone else experienced this?

What were you fishing with ?

I used grasshoppers, cut yoy bg, small whole bg, food source worms, and casted small plugs for a long time. I even caught 2 small bass on cutbait but the bg were passing on my offerings. I need to get some crickets from the pet store. Where do bg hang out in the hottest part of the summer????

The BG in our pond have been suspended over deep water in the middle of the pond ever since they pulled off the beds.

All Summer I have been finding little BG on the bottom and the bigger ones are always higher up than I think they should be, kinda like Shorty's experience.

Ours are like Shorty's and move shallow early and late to feed.

Keith, the BG fishing has been very tough at our pond here lately too. I spent yesterday afternoon raking some of the leftover floating coontail in our pond and the number of invertebrates in the still green coontail was simply amazing. There are all sizes of dragonfly larve from small to mature adults almost ready to emerge, some sort of predacious diving beetle, a few were even carrying egg bundles on their backs, damselfly larva, gizzillions of snails, and I even found a few blood worms in the coontail too. Basically there is a lot of natural food in the water for the BG right now. In our case, the weed treament we did here recently has really opened these invertabrates to predation by our BG and made the BG fishing tough.

Same here on the tough BG bite...however, I finally "THINK" I've figured out what's going on. Fished Sat evening and caught a few decent gills, not exactly where I thought they should be...3-5 feet deep, at the bottom of the sharper drops, near the edge of the weedbeds.

However, I also managed to spook and catch several dandy LMB, while reeling these BG in. I think the LMB are patrolling the weed beds and shallower edges quite heavily. The water's pretty clear (perhaps 30 inches or better overall visibility) so the BG aren't hanging around much where I expected them to be, near the banks and small brush piles.

Me thinks the predators are just plain hunting the BG hard.

Keith, that's why they call it fishin instead of catchin.

Keith Wolfe � Have you considered trying a 1/32� or 1/16� jig with a 1� - 2� plastic grub? If the BG are suspended in the water column and not actively feeding you may need to entice them into action by slowly jigging that small presentation in front of their faces. Very slow speed trolling or drifting with the same setup is a great way to find the locations and depths of suspended BG as well.

Since I never use live bait I am not what you would call a �mainstream bluegill fisherman�. Sometimes trying something different will result in serious action, especially on the larger more experienced fish.