Bluegill, not chinquapins, were hot

On our favorite lake, the bream seem behind schedule

The moon’s reflection in the water was nearly full circle, which is why the plan was to find an active bed of redear bream, a.k.a. chinquapin or shellcracker.

It was April 1 and we were hoping to fool some panfish into biting our hooks and finding a spot on our menu over the Easter weekend.

With April’s full moon scheduled for Saturday, the thought was that the chinquapins would be ready to bed and the 60-acre lake near Canton we were fishing has several spots where the big ones always go to spawn.

Armed with crickets and worms, we hit the first spot and young Taylor Pratt, 11, was the first one with a line in the water. The cricket hit first, then the weight and then the little Styrofoam bobber, which never stopped.

It shot under the water as soon as it touched the surface.

“He’s got it, get him,” Joe Watts was hollering at his grandson. “Set the hook; set the hook.”

Pratt bowed up on the 11-foot B&M jig pole and the battle was on, with the 4-pound test mono stretched tight.

“The pole will wear him down, just let it swim until he slows up and then lift him up here,” said Watts, who a few seconds later had a surprise plopped into his waiting hands.

“Would you look at the size of that bluegill; I’d have sworn it was a chinquapin,” Watts said. “That’s a pounder right there. Look, it goes from my watch on my wrist past my fingers.”

Pratt put another cricket in the water, and this time the little bobber had a chance to settle … for five seconds. Then it shot under and the youngster was setting back on the pole.

It was another big bluegill, caught about 3½ feet deep in 5 feet of water.

“Looks like the bluegill are starting to move in already, but it’s too early for them to bed,” Watts said. “I caught a few the other day and the eggs in the females were still in the early formative stages.

“And the few chinquapins we’ve been catching shallow have been males. The females are still out in 8 or 9 feet of water, on the bottom and we’ve had to tight-line on the bottom with worms to get them. It may be later than the April full moon but that will be the first time in a long, long time that the chinquapins have been that late.”

The surface temperature was just above 70 degrees.

“It’s warm enough for them, I think the clarity of the water is so good that it takes all day for it to catch and hold enough sun for it to warm up,” I told Watts. “I’ve heard about bedding chinquapins in some of the state lakes already, but they are rarely this clear.”

Didn’t matter anyway; when you’re catching the quality bluegill Pratt had started the day with, it’s tough to complain.

The problem was that we couldn’t match the fast start. It was a fish here, two fish there and then another one over there.

“They just haven’t congregated,” Watts said. “Let’s check around those piers at the upper end of that cove and see if they’re stacked over there. That guy’s got nearly half an acre of pea gravel all around.”

It was there that we found the story.

We caught some nice male bluegill and one nice male chinquapin on the shallow gravel in 2 to 3 feet of water. But, when Pratt and Watts both tested the deeper water on the outer edges of the gravel beds, the action was hot and heavy for the next hour.

Pratt caught a 1¼-pound female chinquapin fishing 4 feet deep in 6 feet of water, and combined we caught all the female bluegill we wanted to clean in that same area.

Synopsis, which was proven later when we cleaned the fish: The males of both bream species were shallow, probably in the first steps of choosing a bedding site. The females were holding in the deeper water, probably staging for when they get the urge to spawn.

At day’s end, we had a stringer full of big bluegill and the two chinquapins. When Pratt’s dad picked him up, Watts and I got in an hour of bass fishing. We caught 10.

Every single bass we hooked came out of less than 2 feet of water. They are bedding and should be through about the time the bream move in. That’s good news for the bass, which will soon find a fresh food source, but bad for the bream, which will spawn a lot of meals for the largemouth.

We just hope enough survive to keep the lake’s population steady and produce a lot of future fish fries for us.