Bluegills, Crappies and bass! 9/17-18

I finally got up to fish with Patrick Kealy Olson this weekend. We had talked about it for a couple of years now. It almost seemed like we had fished many times before, since we chatted often on the internet and seen many pics of his adventures. We had a great time on a couple of lakes in the bemidji area he had lined up for us.
The first day we hit a bigger lake with his friend who had a small boat. We started looking for gills in their usual spot, but it was too windy, so we found a calm cove that had some nice clear water with deep grass that held quite a few bass and a few pike. A few bluegills showed up and were pretty nice sized. I should have got more photos, but I was into getting video clips that I will post later. The one bluegill I got a pic of was 10.7 inches!
The next day we hit a small bass pond his relatives live on, with the float tubes. Patrick went to chase some panfish while I worked the pads with a plastic frog. I got a few right away, they were really aggressive, nailing the frog good, but they were pretty small fish. I went out to the edge and worked a jig in deeper with the same results.
Patrick was in deep water jigging with a short ice fishing rod with a forage minnow spoon tipped with gulp minnows, and hammering the nice gills and crappies. I was wishing I had a shortie too, but had to settle for my 10 ft crappie rod. threw a leech on a jig and dropped it down in around 18 ft, and got a nice big bluegill! It was nonstop action for gills with the leech and nice sized ones too. I decided to try for the crappies, and in place of the leech I put on a purple radical glow tube and started getting good crappies, some over a pound!

Thanks for the great weekend Patrick! It was a blast!