With teaching and grad. class I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked the last few weeks but after reading Derek’s article about catching gills at night I thought I would dabble with that idea a little bit. On Thursday night we were set up by about 5:00 and the bite for gills was hot until we left at 7. Size 10 & 12 tear drops were the ticket and color or model style didn’t matter. These gills were on the feed. I never had really tried for gills at night and for my first attempt doing so, I had a blast. The fish would not even show up on the screen to start. I would put my bait about 6 inches from the bottom and by paying close attention to my sonar (vexilar FL8 ) 
I would notice a fish come off the bottom and my sonar would get extremely red by my bait, but my slip bobber wouldn’t even move. (This is where Dereks advice came in handy.) I just gently lift up and fish on! No feel of this fish biting through my rod or bobber at all. We caught about 100 gills on both nites. Sun. we got on the water earlier but the bite was still hot. These gills were absolute pigs. 3/4 of the fish caught were between 8 1/2 to 9 3/4 inches. My biggest was close to 10 which I will have to submit to Luke for the IDA contest. Thanks for the good read Derek! 
Here’s some photos of a few of the gills we caught. Since there is alot of run off (w/ tons of pesticides and fertilizers) that goes into the body of water we were fishing we threw all the fish back. (Maybe that’s why there so big!)
January 22, 2007 at 8:12 pm
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