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Do gills congregate near shore in the Fall prior to retreating to their deep Winter haunts? Maybe to fatten up for the long Winter?

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ive been following the fish in healthy weeds through out the seasons.

with the warm winter and thin ice on our lakes last year we found the fish in 9-0 ' or less through out the ice fishing season. green weed beds were key.

i have seen some pretty good fall bites close to shore here in Ohio on sunny day's even in some colder days im talking on public  lakes not somebody's tame ponds.........

i looked over my database and found some catches close to ice-in late fall or early winter. typically i have used slip/float/waxie or crawler bits and left the jigging poles at home. this year is going to be different

Yes, I'm not talking private ponds, either. I'm talking public lakes.

In my area they do Bruce........take today........water temps in the mid 70s...........fish stacked back in as shallow as two feet........we fished the shore line in a basin that holds a tremendous amount of deep winter fish...............

We noticed an unusual pattern a couple trips ago as surf temps dipped into the upper 60’s… many fish moving up and down in the water column along the deep drop-off in 25-0’ FOW . Dropping a vertical jig presentation in front of them produced many good b.gills when we expected them to be b.crappie… 3 yr old Connor was tagging them with a slip float set at 2-0’ over the deep basin…the b.crappie ended up on the mud flats in 6-0 ft of water. A kinda flip-flop what we expected for the day.

Up until last year I hadn't been serious about pan fish for about 20 years. I remember that we caught the largest gills and crappie in the Spring and Fall, if I remember correctly. We fished from shore. We always fished a rubber jig tipped with wax or meal worms.

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