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Comment

Comment by Jim Gronaw on May 27, 2013 at 7:14am

Walt is absolutely correct, and his gentle reminder should be considered by all of us. Great fish, and great genetics help to maintain top-level fisheries. You can fish down 'size structure' in panfish populations, but almost never fish down numbers. To most of us on this board, any one of those coppers on that stringer would be considered a 'lifetime' catch. Keep a hard earned trophy, a mess of smaller 'eaters' for the pan. and release the majority of the big boys, and you will enjoy this fantastic fishing for many years.

A rare and treasured fishery, indeed!

Comment by Mark Stine on May 27, 2013 at 4:10am

Go NICK!!!  what a great looking fish it's huge!

Comment by Walt Foreman on May 26, 2013 at 9:30pm

Fantastic fish.  Just a friendly suggestion, but consider keeping mostly smaller fish and releasing the biggest ones.  Research by mutiple DNRs in the past twelve years has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that large bluegill can be fished out as easily as large bass or any other species; and, removing the big ones also has a more serious and permanent effect on the bluegill population of a water body in that it can permanently skew the genetics of the population toward smaller fish.  I too used to keep most of the big ones I caught, until I read those studies, and thought about multiple public lakes where I had seen big bluegill get fished out and never recover.