Just got back from a weekend in Wisconsin chasing pannies and bass. We met up with my wife’s side of the family at their cabin. Found the BIG sunfish up on the rocks! Some were bedding, others were just cruising. Looks like we just missed the major spawn as most were off beds… although I wasn’t too worried about people over-harvesting because there was no more than 3 boats on the lake at any given time… I was told every house on the lake is a cabin (not live-in housing) and most people don’t fish… bummer for them 
The lake was around 300 acres so not a giant body of water. The water was very clear and not a lot of depth other than in a few spots. Most of the lake was 4-6 feet so it was like looking for a needle in a haystack when it came to finding pods of good-sized gills…
Friday night we spent most of the time scouting and ended up finding the “hot spot” right before we got called in for dinner (ok, called in 4 or 5 times ). It was a very nice gravel/small rock spot right in the middle of a giant weed flat. I marked the spot on my GPS and we planned to hit it first thing Saturday morning. Although, on Friday night my bro-in-law did catch the biggest gill of the weekend… a tanker 10.75 incher! I took a picture on my cell phone and I’ll get it up later this week…
So, at 5am Saturday morning we hopped in the boat and cruised out to the magic spot… and sure enough, they were there in full force! Must have been about 100 true bull gills sitting on this spot and to say they were aggressive was an understatement… we caught one after another for about an hour straight… biggest one on Saturday hit about 10.5 inches and was a VERY tall hybrid that we really should have weighed but just let it go right away. Seemed as if most of the fish were in the 8.5-9.5 inch range so an exceptional average.
After about an hour of this we decided to move on down the bank and cast for more spots… we found a nice shoreline were a series of sunken trees were scattered about… and it took one cast to find another pod of giant gills… WHAM! We hooked into a nice pre-spawn pumpkinseed that looks like it swallowed a tennis ball! I don’t think I’d ever seen a gill so fat! It was not that long but freakishly fat, very cool to see. We proceeded to pick up a pile of gills along that shoreline before heading in for lunch…
All of our panfish were caught on hand-tied hair-jigs (the jig had to fall extremely slow for the fish to bite). We tried tubes, twister tails, Gulp! Alive minnows… but nothing seemed to work all that well. It was a wierd bite and I’m sure the very clear water had something to do with it. It took us a little while to figure it out but once we did I broke out the box of weighted flies and we never looked back… didn’t need to tip them with anything, just the hair and tinsel worked well enough…
After lunch on Saturday we switched gears and hunted down some bass… this was a good move because I honestly think we caught more bass than sunfish when the weekend was over… the bass were insane! Not many big fish… largest was maybe 3.5 pounds but most were 10-14 inches. They were committing suicide and t-boning everything we threw at them. They were stacked up in two lilypad spots and along a long sandy bar. By this point it was raining and didn’t stop for hours but we didn’t care. I’m a diehard panfish guy, but these bass made me forget about the pannies because of how fast and furious the bite was… I can honestly say we had triples about a dozen times throughout the weekend on bass. It was borderline ridiculous, just wish they were a little larger but still fun.
We caught our bass mostly on slugs but a few on buzzbaits and jigs and of course picked a bunch off when fishing for panfish too.
Water temps were anywhere from 71-76 depending on where we were… although this morning we had 66 degree water temps when we hit the lake at 5am… that cold rain last night sure cooled things down a bit… and the bite was not as good this morning either…
Probably the best part about the weekend was when we all piled up on the dock and pontoon and fished for panfish. There was about a dozen of us… my wife and son both caught a pile of sunfish and a couple bass… my mother-in-law caught a bunch of sunfish… my sister-in-law and their kids caught sunfish after sunfish… it was just a lot of fun to watch and partake in… and of course, I spent the entire time taking off fish but well worth it! 
… BUT, I did have a helper to throw the fish back in the lake once I took them off… my son, Jack, was more than eager to grab the fish and toss them back in the lake. I would take it off, hand the fish to Jack and then he would toss it back… what a hoot!!!
Overall an exceptional weekend! Couldn’t ask for better company and we ate well too! I will be visiting WI again in the near future…