Photo by Tom Evans.

Here's a question for all you serious bluegill anglers: Have you ever noticed when unhooking bluegills that most of the twistertail or night crawler you used for bait is dangling outside the bluegill's mouth?

That's because the average bluegill's mouth is barely large enough to gulp the baits and lures that many anglers use to catch 'gills. If bluegills weren't such an aggressive species willing to choke themselves on our oversized offerings, many more of us would go home with empty stringers.

As it is, who knows how many bluegills ignore our super-sized bluegill baits and lures? Who knows how many more fish we could take home if we downsized our offerings to match the tiny insects and invertebrates on which bluegills normally dine?

Steve Anderson knows. "I've fished side-by-side with guys using the smallest, lightest ultralight spinning tackle they could use, and I caught two or three bluegills on my fly rod for every bluegill they caught," he said. "If you really want to catch bluegills, a fly rod is the way to go."

SIGHT-FISHING DURING THE SPAWN
In the spring, Anderson ties on a black ant or other dark-colored floating fly to tantalize bluegills in shallow water spawning beds. The results he characterizes as "nearly explosive."

"If you put just about any black floating fly over them when they're on their beds, they can't resist it," he said. "I sight-fish in the shallows, flip a black ant over a nest when I see one, and they absolutely hammer those little flies. Plus, because you can generally keep using the same fly, you don't waste a lot of time rebaiting with a worm or putting on a new twistertail after your old one gets torn up."

As the spawn tapers off, Anderson switches to a nymph pattern that he ties himself, and follows bluegills to deeper water.

"It's tough to fish much deeper than 4 feet, even if you use a wet fly or nymph pattern, but that's okay, because bluegills aren't a deep-water fish," he said. "If you fish around the edges of a pond or lake, along the edges of weedlines or in woody cover associated with the shoreline, you're going to be targeting 90 percent of the bluegills that are available."

Anderson's go-to pattern for deeper bluegills is his "bead-eyed leech." He purchases lightweight silver-beaded "plumber's chain" such as is commonly used to turn on and off basement lights and cuts the beads apart.

"I use the little stems between the beads to tie two beads side by side behind the eye of a dry-fly hook," he said. "The beads are the 'eyes' of the leech. Normally you use a nymph hook for this sort of fly, but I like the finer wire and shorter shank of a dry-fly hook to give me a shorter, tighter leech. I use either a piece of black marabou or little fluffs of pheasant feather to finish it, and it's absolutely deadly.

"The beads are hollow, but not sealed, so they fill with water. That uneven filling makes the leech dance as it sinks. I've never seen anything catch bluegills the way it does."

Anderson often fishes in farm ponds or small public lakes from a belly boat or "kick-boat," which has two small Styrofoam or inflated pontoons with a nylon seat on an aluminum frame between the pontoons. The angler's feet dangle in the water, and either swimming flippers or small oars are used to maneuver the boat. He catches bluegills throughout the summer by fishing in and around emergent weeds that ring many small bodies of water.