LOCAL smallmouth guru Duane Hada and the Journal were sitting around the fly tying table yakking about various things fly fishing when we started on warmwater.
In the Ozarks smallmouth get a lot of attention, with good reason, but somewhere along this meandering conversation I mused aloud that most days I’d be just as happy with a “twig rod”, a pocketfull of poppers and a bunch of panfish. Duane, while not going as far to say they would match his beloved Ozark smallies, ventured similar views.
And so starts our Bluegill Appreciation Society here on the Journal, a way for the pan fish to gain some much needed PR. Ok so trout are our mainstay and we take this fun very seriously indeed, but as we have said before fly fishing is just about adults playing kids again just with more expensive toys.
And if there is one type of fishing that truly captures the mud between the toes, no school for 3 months summer holidays, snow cones and sunburn type of innocence more than the bluegill and their relatives in the sunfish family.
Now given our preferences we would be doing it on 3wt or small stick, preferably under 8′ in length but all we say is do it on a fly rod with a fly.
Membership so the Society is cheap as chips, all you have to do is send in a picture of you and some bluegill or any of the other panfish species. We’ll start a new page with some of these photos. At the end of the season (probably November) we’ll come up with a prize for the picture which best captures the spirit of pan fishing with fly rods.
Email your pics, and a few words, or an essay (your choice but at least give us who, where and when) and we will run them here. We’ll toss up some panfish fly photos from time to time, a few articles on rods, flies and so on.
