Welcome to The Bluegill Pond

Crappies have more aliases than a convention hall full of career criminals. Calico, chinquapin, lamplighter, and ol’ silversides are but a few of the nearly 60 colorful monikers we’ve encountered over the years. Imagine the surprise I felt when I was invited to fish a...

Autumn is a time of movement for riverine smallmouth bass. This migration may be a relatively short distance or many miles, and while the largest percentage of bass move downstream, a significant number migrate upstream. Their purpose is to locate suitably deep water...

Recent cool over-nights may have induced crappies, or sac-a-lait in the Cajun vernacular, to migrate from the reservoirs into the rivers to feed before winter. To find out, I waded downstream to a long pool with multiple deadfalls armed with a 5wt rod, intermediate...

A cooling Northwest breeze fueled my hope for encountering surface-feeding bluegills in a weed-line encased pasture pond. I planned to fish a size-8 Rat-Faced McDougall fly created by Catskill fly tying legend Harry Darbee in the 1930s. Darbee’s dry fly has a a...

From the comfort of a bankside log, I listened to the deafening buzz of crickets and katydids while searching my flybox for the magic offering that might resurrect a fruitless search for smallmouth bass. I knotted a size-8 weighted Muddler Minnow with 3X tippet and...

Some describe the instant of the hook-set on a sizeable surface feeding largemouth bass as the most exciting split-second in all of sports. I’m one of them. That moment initiates a violent explosion of whitewater infused with bits of weeds and moss followed by a...