The March full moon brought the panfish to the beds this week
Got this terse e-mail from a friend Wednesday: “Redear bedding, and they are huge!”
Sent this terse reply: “Yeah buddy! On my way!”
Within two hours, we had a 48-quart ice chest half full of hand-sized bream, all of them a mix of brilliant gold and green with that little red edge around its gill flap.
We quit, knowing it was all we wanted to clean and enough for us to enjoy fresh fish for a few days. By then, it would be the weekend and we could get us another fresh load.
“Don’t know what it is about those little peckerwoods, but I truly love to get them on a hook with either ultra-light spinning gear or a jig pole,” said my pal and longtime bream-fishing partner Joe Watts of Canton. “They bite willingly. They pull hard. They taste great.
“What’s not to love?”
Exactly, and all of those are reasons why I would rather catch redear — a.k.a. chinquapins, shellcrackers and stump knockers — than just about any other fish that swims in our fresh waters. They are plentiful in Mississippi, from our rivers and our lakes to the thousands of stocked subdivision lakes and farm ponds.
Watts’ lake is of the subdivision variety, about 50 acres in size and it offers good redear, bluegill, largemouth bass and cyclic crappie action.
Normally, the redear start bedding in late March, about a month to six weeks before the bluegill, but the mid-month full moon this week apparently brought them in early.
“I got in my Gator to ride around the lake and make a few casts for bass,” Watts said. “Before I went very far, I started smelling fish. You know that smell, bedding bream. I ran into a neighbor and she said she’d been smelling it, too, and she asked me if I thought it could be bream starting to bed. I told her that if it was, it had to be redear.”
Just saying those words, Watts said, made him rethink his fishing plan that afternoon.
“I went back in the house, grabbed my jig pole and a black jig and went to test one of our traditional spawning areas,” he said. “I didn’t have any crickets or worms. You know we haven’t been able to fish the bedding period for bream the last few years because we had to draw the lake down twice and keep it down for dam repair. We weren’t sure if the fish would come back to the old places.”
They did.
“I walked out on the pier, dropped the jig down in an old gravel bed and Bam! I caught a big redear right off the bat,” Watts said. “A few minutes later I caught another one. I quit immediately and headed down to get some crickets and sent you that e-mail. I had no idea you would nearly beat me back to the lake.”
Mississippi is full of great public opportunities to get redear, but because of the great difference in latitude (tall state), there is a discrepancy south to north on when the little panfish will make their spawning move to the shallows.
Right now, it appears the best action is in the southern two-thirds of the state where water temperatures have risen faster.
“We were catching redear deep a week ago at Johnson State Park (south of Hattiesburg, U.S. Highway 49), then it was like somebody flipped a switch and all of a sudden they moved to the banks,” said Phillip Thompson of Petal. “We had been tightlining with redworms in 6 to 10 feet of water and when we went back on Sunday, the bite had slowed way down.
“We moved up early to an old bream bed I fish every year and they were there. We caught about 25 in one spot, moved and found another old bed holding fish. The water temperature was 61 degrees.”
Northeast Mississippi is home to two of the state’s best redear lakes, Trace State Park at Pontotoc and Tippah County Lake at Ripley. The surface temperatures there are still in the mid 50s and no bedding activity has been reported.
“Maybe on the new moon in two weeks or on the April full moon on the 15th,” said Paul Reynolds of Tupelo. “If we can get the water temperature up without another cold snap then I’m betting the new moon on March 30 but it could easily be April 15. I actually would prefer April 15 because a lot of fishermen will go to the bigger lakes to catch crappie and the pressure will not be as great on the redear beds.”
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