When Denny Hettig goes bluegill fishing, he gets the boat off the trailer, drops the trolling motor, and starts fishing. He doesn’t look for structure or cover or thermoclines or anything. He just starts trolling in deep open water, with a red worm on a small harness, and he catches fish quickly and in good numbers.
“Most bluegill fishermen look for weed beds,” says Hettig, a retired utility worker who has been perfecting the art of trolling for bluegills for a couple of decades. “I try to avoid them.
Denny Hettig doesn’t look for structure or cover or thermoclines or anything. He just starts trolling in deep open water, with a red worm on a small harness, and he catches fish quickly and in good numbers.
“You know when you’re fishing, you see those little rings on the surface out in deep water? Those are bluegills. Everyone is fishing on the bottom in 10 to 15 feet of water, but the majority of the fish–and especially the big ones–are out in open water.”
He’s made a believer out of me. I’ve been fishing with him, a day or two a year, for about 20 years now and we’ve never failed to catch a good mess of fish.
Hettig makes Bo’s Bluegill Busters, which look like downsized crawler harnesses. He ties two No. 6 hooks about two inches apart–a bit shorter than the average red worm –on two-foot length of four-pound monofilament with some beads and a small spinner blade. When he rigs up, he puts a small snap swivel tow which he attaches a small weight, above the swivel on the harness. Generally, when we fish we put out four rods with different weights (1/16 to 1/4 ounce, though he has lighter and heavier sinkers on hand in case things aren’t going well)) and troll slowly (usually around 1 mile an hour, though he’ll change speeds if he’s not catching to his satisfaction) and just keep going.
“The first thing in the morning when you get on the lake, just spread out with different weights until you figure out what’s going on that day,” he says. “It’ll change every day.
“When you’re doing this, you’re picking off the active bluegills from all over the lake. You’re not sitting in one place pounding a school. I might catch six or seven out of a school, but by then, I’m off somewhere else.”
I’ve noticed how he’s refined his rigging over the years. When he first started, for instance, he used No. 8 hooks. But he upsized, he said because too many fish were taking the smaller hooks too deep and were getting gut-hooked. And he added the sliding weight system – when he first started he just pinched on some split shots – because it makes it easier to change weights if one depth is producing better than the others. But our last two times out we never changed anything as everything was producing.
The two times I fished with him this year we were out a little more than two hours each time. The first time we brought back 30 fish (29 ‘gills and one perch) and the second we kept 26 bluegills, but we threw back five that were pushing nine inches.
That’s Hettig’s M.O. He prefers 7 ½ to 8-inch bluegills (“they’re the best eating,” he says) and the bigger ones “are your brood stock.”
And though we’ve caught our two-man limit of 50 plenty of times, Hettig says he prefers to catch 12 to 15 per man, for conservation reasons.
“That’s enough for a good dinner for two with enough left over for fish sandwiches the next day,” he said. “You can hurt a lake doing this.”
As a rule of thumb, the shallowest-running rigs produce the best first thing in the morning, and the deeper lines do better as the sun climbs in the sky. But the fish are suspended throughout the water column, Hettig says, so you always want to be trolling at a variety of depths
Hettig’s system works from ice out to ice up, though it’s best when the water warms up.
“It slows down in cold water,” he said. “I’d say from May to deer season is best, though I have done it in December some years. And in February some years, too.”
There are two keys to his presentation, Hettig says. Instead of trolling in a straight line, he makes long, sweeping S turns as he covers water. That way the inside lines are running a little deeper and the outside lines are dropping a little on the turn, something that he says trigger strikes. The other key is you want a soft-tipped rod, which allows the fish to get the bait, sort of the same way you throw slack into the line when life-bait rigging for walleyes – which is where he got the idea for the whole system in the first place.
“I used to fish for walleyes and I was always getting my night crawlers bit off by bluegills,” he said. “It was frustrating.
“Let’s face it, if you downsize your equipment, go to four-pound test line and light action rods, bluegills are a blast.”
And bluegills, the main target, are only part of the catch. We always catch a bunch of bass (often sub-legal largemouths, but the occasional good one) but generally a handful of whatever else is in the lake. We’ve caught crappie, rock bass, walleyes, pike–we even caught a couple of rainbow trout one time on one of those stocked lakes. “I’ve caught two muskies, catfish, dogfish, everything. If you stay away from the weeds, you just have to take your time and you’ll get them.”
If there’s a downside to Hettig’s system, it’s that you will lose some baits. When a big toothy critter inhales it, well, those 4-pound test harnesses don’t have much of a chance. (Hettig also makes a version that’s tied on 8-pound test, that he says he made after requests from walleye fishermen.)
Hettig says the fishing is better when it’s overcast and there’s a slight chop on the water. If it’s sunny and slick on the surface, the deeper lines are often best. And on those days the fishing really picks up when the sun recedes.
What is best about Hettig’s system is it’s almost idiot-proof. It works just about everywhere except shallow, weedy lakes (though I have done well with it on Houghton Lake, which is both relatively shallow and weedy). It is a perfect system for guys who can’t catch ‘em or fellows who are taking neophytes or impatient youngsters fishing.
But the oddest thing about it is, many years ago, when I first wrote about it, a neighbor–who was a fisheries researcher at Michigan State–told me they’d conducted an experiment on a lake, by netting off various sections by depths. When they surveyed the fish populations, he said, the biggest bluegills were in the deep, open water.
