Jeep® Sporting Destinations

Simple Pleasures: Flyrodding for Panfish

by Jim Fergus

"...recently I've become somewhat of an aficionado of flyrodding for panfish...a fine balance between childhood and adult angling pleasures."

Panfish can revive the child in your fishing.

One of the things I love about fishing for panfish is that it's such a purely democratic sport, pursued by all ages, classes and races of people.

The panfish is in a real sense a populist fish, unlike, say, the snooty trout, and some form of panfish exists in virtually every region of the nation.

The same sense of democracy applies to the gear used to catch panfish, everything from $10 cane poles to $500 graphite fly rods. Furthermore, the lowly panfish is a hearty and prolific breeder, excellent on the table and numerous enough in many American waters that even the most assiduous practitioner of catch-and-release angling doesn't have to feel guilty about putting on an occasional fish fry for friends and family.

But perhaps the most endearing aspect of fishing for panfish is its roots as the sport of childhood where so many of us got our start as anglers. When I was a kid, I used to walk, fishing pole and tackle box in hand, the couple of blocks from my home in the Chicago suburbs down to Lake Michigan. There I'd set up on an old concrete piling that jutted into the lake and ply the water for perch.

It hardly mattered that they weren't big fish -- a one-pounder was a trophy. Indeed, I tried, with distinctly mixed results, to mount one such whopper using a mail-order taxidermy kit that I ordered out of the back of a sporting magazine. Of course, in the best of circumstances the perch is not exactly a sea-run brown trout in the looks department, and my mount looked disconcertingly like a overgrown minnow.

Nor did it matter that they were not stylish fish. What was important is that the perch and bluegills and crappies of our youth, hooked us once and forever on the sport of angling, awakened dreams in our little fishermen's hearts of more exotic gamefish species in faraway angling destinations.

I could sit on my piling, catch an occasional perch, and enjoy elaborate reveries of trout fishing the storied rivers of Montana or Colorado. And today, in a kind of odd reverse process, fishing for panfish has become an avenue back to the uncomplicated angling of childhood.

Maybe it's some harmless manifestation of a mid-life crisis, but recently I've become somewhat of an aficionado of flyrodding for panfish, which seems to me to offer a fine balance between childhood and adult angling pleasures. Whereas the sport may be about as far away as one can get from trophy fishing, on light tackle (a two-weight line and a fly rod that weighs a mere one ounce) and small popping bugs, it offers the same kind of pure fun, unadulterated by the notion that bigger is better, as fishing small mountain streams for diminutive brook trout.

As far as craft goes, to my mind nothing lends itself better to the simple pursuit of panfishing than a canoe. Load it on top of the car, throw your tiny, wand-like fly rod with a reel little bigger than an Oreo cookie into the back seat, and off you go.

My panfish country these days is the Florida panhandle -- the Apalachicola and Ochlockonee river systems -- a lush and sometimes impenetrable network of lakes, ponds, swamps, creeks, tributaries and rivers full of that most southern of panfish, the bream.

Pronounced "brim," bream is actually a regional generic name that describes several different members of the sunfish family, one of which is a dead-ringer for what we call a bluegill in the north. The world rod-and-reel record for bluegills is right around 4-3/4 pounds. For its slightly larger relative, the shellcracker (actually a redear sunfish), another favored southern panfish, the world record is a shade over 5 pounds -- truly a monster in the panfish world.

April, when they're on the spawning beds, is the best time to fish for shellcrackers, especially during the full moon phase when the fish do their most active spawning. The beds appear as circular openings of sand on the bottom of the creek or pond, where the shellcrackers have burrowed out holes in which to lay and fertilize their eggs.

This time of year I frequently run into veteran shellcracker anglers "up the river" -- old local couples fishing with cane poles and bait, and wearing straw hats and bandannas. These old-timers husband and jealously guard the location of their favorite spawning beds and tend to look with some degree of amusement, possibly even disdain, upon my canoe and fly rod. But the fact is, they also love the opportunity to hold forth on the finer points of their sport, and it's always instructive, both from an angling perspective as well as a cultural one, to stop and visit with them.

The shellcrackers tend to be aggressive on the beds, and while I'll never outfish a veteran bait fisherman, I catch my fair share by skittering a tiny popping bug across the surface. The hearty little panfish come up from the depths to smack it with all the wild abandon of a largemouth bass hitting a topwater plug. Relatively small though they are, sunfish are a wide-bodied species -- nearly as wide as they are long -- and hooking a two-pounder on an ultra-light fly rod is a bit like fighting a swimming skillet.

Later in the month after the shellcrackers have left the beds, the bream (or bluegills) move onto the spawning beds, which they do several times a year. But panfish don't have to be spawning to be caught on a fly rod. I often just drift the shoreline of the creeks or ponds, casting against the bank or against any kind of underwater structure -- tree stumps or brush piles -- around which the bream tend to hang out.

In the spring, the dogwoods and wild azalea are in bloom, the hardwood forests greening up. I paddle through stands of old-growth cypress and past miles of pine forest, across ponds ringed by marsh grass, flipping casts along edges and into pockets, the little bream flashing a deep yellow-green in the sun as they slash at the poppers. True, it is not sophisticated fishing, -- panfish are not wary or selective -- but honestly I haven't had so much fun fishing since I was a kid.

Copyright © 1999 Jim Fergus. All rights reserved.

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