Saturday, April 30, 2011

FINALLY the ponds turn on

The ponds I frequent have been slow to give up their treasures this Spring. With the very late warming trend and a lot of cold rain, the spring seems to be compressed into a very short window this year. Which means - you better hit it hard when it gets good.

And I think it is poised to get good in northern Illinois.

My wife, son and I went to the ponds at 4:30 this afternoon. We fished the lower pond for about an hour and upper one for maybe 45 minutes. It was good - real good.

The lower pond is the one with the mixed bag of fish - rainbow trout, walleye, largemouth bass, bluegill, crappie, channel cat. The upper pond has bass, gills, and cats. Joey hung out and explored stuff on the lower pond, while Stacy and I threw UL spin gear with 1/32 oz. jigheads with 2" Lindy Munchies grubs. In the hour we fished, we landed 7 trout, 4 walleye, 1 crappie, a pile of gills. Hits were frequent and you never knew what was on the end of the line. Stacy suggested we try the upper pond to see if the bass were biting up there. Even though all we had along was UL gear, we went up to try the upper pond.

Well, the fish were ON up there, too. I threw a small (1/8 oz.) spinnerbait while Stacy and Joey threw 1/16 oz. Beetle Spins. the gills and pumpkinseeds were bigger than I have seen recently, and the bass were holding about 10'-15' off of the rock edges that they use to spawn. Most of the bass caught were smaller males, but I got a few nice ones, including one BIG egg-loaded female. An absolute blast on an UL spin outfit!! We probably landed 30 panfish and 12-15 bass.



(Sorry for the picture quality (or lack thereof) - its from my son's phone)

If you have ponds nearby, get out as often ans you can over the next month. It's FINALLY time to capitalize on the pond fish!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Two things, Wolfy, great to see you out with the family and enjoying family fishing. Secondly, real nice Bass. Sounds like loads of fun.

Bill said...

That looks like it would be one heck of a fight on the ultrlight! Good stuff Wolfy!

Mark Kautz said...

Go get 'um my friend. I know there are more with your name on them, just waiting.

Mark

Unknown said...

From the pic, it looks like those are more than ponds. I'd say mini lakes. Did you take home the blue gills?

stephanie

Wolfy said...

Stephanie - I planned to bring home some filets but my wife convinced me to let them go. I got a nice walleye and crappie, too, in addition to the gills.

I'll be fileting a bunch of them over the next 2-3 weeks

cofisher said...

Nicely done Wolfy. It's great to get out with the family. Nice shirt...

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