By Lynn Burkhead For the Herald Democrat
Over the years, I’ve written a fair amount about bluegills as spring prepares to turn into summer, because that’s how I got started in the angling game many years ago.
But as best as I can remember, I’ve never specifically written about redear sunfish, or shellcrackers, as the spunky little sunfish are known.
And actually, in many cases, shellcrackers aren’t so little at all, growing to be the size of a respectable bass weighing upwards of two-pounds.
While I’ve caught a few hefty bluegills pushing towards two-pounds down through the years, I had never caught a big redear until an early June outing a couple of years ago. But that all changed with one memorable panfish catch in 2020, an angling memory that still brings a smile.
It was a memorable trip in more ways than one, not the least of which was the ongoing uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was only a few weeks old in America at that time. As the world slowly figured its way forward, my trip to Lake Athens with my longtime friend Rob Woodruff was the first adventure I had taken that spring.
It was also my first visit to Lake Athens, a 1,799-acre grass filled lake impounded in 1962 and home to a lake record largemouth weighing 14-plus pounds. While it’s been a long time since that bucketmouth was caught back in May 1988 by David Weaver, the lake that lies in the shadow of the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center continues to be an excellent fishery cranking out six, seven, eight and even nine-pound bass on occasion.
One of those big bass had been caught a few weeks earlier by Major League Fishing star Ott DeFoe in the Stage 3 MLF tournament held in mid-March 2020. Opening the third and final period on Athens with a nearly 19-pound deficit, DeFoe put on a Championship Day clinic for the ages as he fished a key spot on the lake and caught fish after fish after fish, many of them good bass, and one of them a giant lunker weighing nine pounds, six ounces.
With visions of DeFoe’s winning performance in my head — and thoughts of fly guide Johnny Martinez Jr.’s 8.45-pound lake record fly rod bass too — I hit the water dreaming about a 10-pound largemouth and maybe, a fly rod lake record at that.
But despite warm, tranquil conditions and an overcast morning, the bass simply weren’t biting, unwilling to shake off their post-spawn doldrums and put a serious bend in my eight-weight Orvis fly rod.
After a couple of hours that produced only a couple of small strikes, Woodruff suggested that we change things up a bit and go looking for some of the bluegills, redbreasted sunfish, and redear sunfish that Athens can also harbor.
True to my panfishing roots, I readily agreed and we were soon heading for a different part of the lake in Woodruff’s Xpress aluminum skiff, a shallow draft rig with a poling platform that looks more at home on the redfish rich flats of the Lower Laguna Madre in South Texas than on an East Texas bass lake.
Before long, he found what he was looking for, a shallow region with vegetation, laydowns, and the telltale look of a honeycombed bottom marked with the numerous oval beds of spawning sunfish.
At first, we split up what we were doing, with Woodruff trying a chartreuse beadhead nymph pattern fished a little deeper, and yours truly, choosing the topwater route with some small poppers on the surface.
After Woodruff — who I was seeing for the first time in a few years after Rob and his wife Jenny had moved to Montana to run a lodge, then Belize, and finally returning back to the Lone Star State — landed a couple of feisty bluegills, I got the message.
Soon, I was throwing a small nymph pattern of my own — a dark bodied, rubber legged fly pattern called Verduin’s Cap Spider, if I recall correctly — and I quickly connected with a good sized bluegill or two.
And then it happened, a hard take that put a serious bend in the threeweight fiberglass Orvis fly rod I was now fishing. Thinking it was a bass, Woodruff peered into the water as the fish came near the surface and exclaimed “It’s a shellcracker!”
In strict biological terms, I had hooked a sizable redear sunfish (Lepomis microlophus), a panfish species named for the prominent red edge on the opercle (or ear flap) of the male (the ear flap is orange on the female). According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, redears are native to the eastern two-thirds of Texas, ranging from the Red River to the Rio Grande and introduced westward through the state. In addition to its natural range across the southern U.S. and northward from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, the redear has also been successfully introduced as far west as Arizona and California.
The species is also called a shellcracker by many because of the pharyngeal teeth at the back of their throats, powerful piscatorial molars, if you will, that allow redears to feed on small clams, snails, mussels, etc., using their powerful crunching ability to crush exoskeletons for a quick meal.
Spawning in the spring and early summer, redears will also dine on insect larvae and cladocerans according to TPWD, usually being found towards the bottom of a water body where there is plenty of vegetation and little in the way of current. Unlike bluegills and other sunfish species common to the state, they rarely take surface offerings and are only caught shallow during the spawn.
While shellcrackers average six to 10 inches in size in most places, they can grow easily to 12 to 14 inches in length and weigh two-pounds or better. With that in mind, the Texas state record redear is a huge 2.99-lb. specimen pulled from Austin’s Lady Bird Lake on April 1, 1997 by John Runnels, while the state fly rod record is a 1.75-pound redear caught in the San Marcos River on Aug. 2, 2017 by Jimmy Darnell.
Redears are hard fighting panfish in general, and when they get a good bit of size behind them, they can rival a nice bass as they leverage the shape of their bodies to make a retrieve on light tackle a difficult and enjoyable chore.
I can’t remember how long the fight lasted that morning, but it took a minute or two on Rob’s three weight that had a floating line and a 7 ½ foot leader ending in 4X fluorocarbon tippet. When he finally scooped it up, we were both impressed.
So much so that he pulled out his Boga Grip spring-loaded scale from a recessed compartment. When you catch a panfish big enough to weigh, you know you’re accomplished something.
Amazingly — and I’ve got the pictures to prove it — the spunky shellcracker had been eating well, registering a hair above the one-pound mark on the scale. We took a few photos, measured it at 11.5 inches in length, and let it go to swim angrily back to the nest and keep the Lake Athens’ shellcracker population going for another year.
Woodruff, who has been known to needle me a bit over the years, smiled, reached over, and bumped my fist, congratulating me with the strange new pandemic handshake that we were all getting used to.
“Pretty good shellcracker, Burkhead” he said. “They get bigger, but they’re hard to catch like that, so it might be a while before you tangle with another one that size.”
As it turns out, it was even better than good, as a check of the TPWD water body records for Lake Athens later showed. It wouldn’t have quite measured up to the 1.22-pound redear that was caught in 2007. But it would have surpassed the Athens’ fly rod record for shellcrackers, an 0.85-pound specimen caught in 2004.
Easy come, easy go as there is no TPWD Lake Record certificate bearing my name. But there is the satisfaction of a good day fly fishing with a great friend, even if it involved a record that wasn’t.
Oh well, at least I’ve got another excuse to visit a great little bass lake in East Texas with a fly rod in my hand, right?
Credit: Source link
