We don’t talk much about panfish on Fishing Fury and I’m not sure why. We have definitely been caught up in the excitement of pike and musky fishing in the last four years, but we began fishing as most did, catching little sunfish and bluegil. When finding fish in new locations is slow, I know I can fall back on catching the usually overlooked panfish.
Usually the lures we use are bigger then most panfish, but then again, I had never caught a five pound sunfish before!
The all-tackle world record redear sunfish was caught by Amos M. Gayfrom in 1998. The massive panfish was caught in the Santee Cooper Diversional Canal, South Carolina USA, and weighed 5 pounds, 7.5 ounces.
Rather than facing the weekend boat traffic, we decided to take a midweek fishing trip for my birthday to a lake we had never fished before. Jon, Gillian and I packed up the car shortly after midnight and started our drive to Lake Chemong, located in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. Much like other Kawartha lakes, Chemong offers great bass, walleye and musky fishing.
The drive took less than two hours from Toronto, and we drove around the lake looking for a boat rental in the dark. We spotted several fishermen night-fishing along the causeway that splits the lake in two. We slept a few hours in the car and and rented a boat from a very friendly woman in the small town of Bridgenorth shortly after six.
We started the day using plastic baits to cover shallow water and structure near shore and around several islands to the south of the lake. After a couple hours of fishing, it was clear that we were not going to find any bass in the shallow water. The sun was beating down pretty hard and despite being in the tail end of major heatwave, the bass were still not feeding. We began making drifts through deeper water hoping to locate isolated fish. Jon used jigs, trying to pull fish off the bottom, Gillian used live worms drifting them behind the boat, and I decided to cast my own musky lures hoping for a big one.
Gillian began catching several pan fish including crappie, sunfish, perch and then she landed a good sized largemouth bass which proved to be the biggest fish of the day. We fished a total of six hours and we each got a few small bass before we called it a day.
Gillian and I decided to take a quick trip to the Belleville, Ontario to do some shore fishing in the Bay of Quinte with a couple friends. Very windy conditions and heavy boat traffic made locating walleye and bass very difficult. We ended up targeting small pan fish. We caught a variety of fish, including rock bass, sunfish, bluegill and for the first time I caught a goby. The goby is an invasive species that can be found throughout the great lakes. They take over prime spawning sites traditionally used by native species, competing with native fish for habitat and changing the balance of the ecosystem.
We fished well into the darkness and my friends landed a couple nice bass and a big crappie before we packed up and headed home for a few beers.
