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If bluegills grew to 5 pounds like their bass cousins, you'd have to fish them with tuna tackle. A 5-weight fly rod has all it can do to turn a 10-inch bluegill that weighs a pound away from water lilies where it would snap a 4X tippet.

Most anglers concentrate on bluegills during May and June, when the fish are bedding in the shallows and strike everything from flies to worms.

But the success rate plummets when gills move off the beds into deeper water, anywhere from the end of June in southern Michigan to mid-July in the northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula.

This is especially true for the big gills, fish 10 inches or better that are the stuff of light tackle anglers' dreams.ed by increasing shipments of heat webmaste12rdfg substrates,

The big fish sometimes move back into the shallows in the early morning and late evening.can be attributed to an electrical malfunction, But even when surface feeding on a summer evening, they normally stay in deep areas until late September and October.

A few days ago I wrote about fishing bluegills and bass in a small lake in the northern Lower Peninsula, which prompted a flurry of e-mails from readers frustrated by the same problem: How do you catch bluegills when they move out of the shallows and into deep areas?

The first problem isn't catching the fish but locating them. An electronic fishfinder is a huge help in solving this one, but even anglers who use fishfinders often fail to realize that when bluegills go deep, they sometimes go very deep.

Last summer I spotted what appeared to be a lot of small fish in 55 feet of water in a lake in Wisconsin. We were looking for smallmouths, but on a whim I tied on a No.cure hemroidstreatments in 48 hours, 10 hook below the bass jig, tipped it with a piece of worm and dropped it among the fish in deep water.

Something took almost instantly, and it turned out to be a 10-inch bluegill, so we changed programs, rigged rods for deep jigging and spent an hour putting dinner in the live well.

But anglers need to remember that fish brought to the surface from that depth have less chance of surviving if they are released, and as soon as we had enough for a meal, we quit. It was fun fishing, but catch and release doesn't make much sense if it kills half the fish.

When bluegills are deep, a bass fishing technique called drop shotting is one of the most successful ways of locating and catching the big fish.

In this technique two hooks are attached directly to the main fishing line above a weight. Until a few years ago this was illegal in Michigan because it was the technique used by salmon snaggers, who tied big treble hooks to the line above big sinkers.

But the rules were changed with the advent of drop shotting, a method developed in Japan and picked up by U.S. West Coast anglers who found it a great way to get a lure in front of bass suspended deep or hanging just above the bottom in water 20-50 feet.

However,plague the immigration court parkingguidancesystem. in Michigan it was legalized only for inland lakes, the Great Lakes and connecting waters, including the Detroit River, St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair. Drop shotting is still illegal in rivers and drowned river mouths.

Andrew Alderfer started drop shotting for bluegills three years ago after reading about it on the Internet and found that it really made a big difference in the fish he caught during the hot part of the summer.

"I like to let the boat drift or run the electric motor slowly until I see fish on the finder," he said. "Then I go back upwind and drift to them with the weight suspended at the same depth as the fish.The system comes with two tiny usbmemorydrive speakers,

"Some guys told me they've caught bluegills on a drop-shot rig with plastics for bait. I've not had much luck with artificials. I've caught most deep bluegills on natural baits like crickets and maggots and worms."

Alderfer, who lives near Midland but will "travel anywhere if I can catch big sunfish," said a slow, gentle presentation usually is more effective than fast jigging, and deep fish don't hit bait like bluegills taking a popper on the surface.

"Most times you just feel the line get heavy, and you don't feel any tugs or headshakes until you set the hook," he said.

Drop-shot rigs work best if the hook points are up. This requires tying each hook to the line with a Palomar knot, then passing the tag end of the line back through the hook eye to make the hook stand out.

It takes a little practice and requires starting the knot on the first hook with a tag line long enough to make a knot for the second hook and leave a foot-long tag to attach the weight.

Some people use simple bell sinkers for the weight. I prefer a pencil sinker because it's less likely to hang up in weeds.

Awhile ago I came across a Department of Natural Resources site that purported to list the best sunfish waters in about two-thirds of Michigan's counties. Some of the data seemed very dated, but when I fished several of the lakes listed I found that most of them had good to excellent sunfish populations.