Big bluegill of a lifetime: Gerard Urbanozo finds bluegill so big they look odd

While fishing a private pond north of Peoria “that doesn’t get fished much,” Gerard Urbanozo caught nice bluegill and largemouth bass.

That included this one. “My first big bluegill,” he messaged. “They almost look like coppernose [a Florida subspecies of bluegill].”

I had to look up coppernose, apparently popular as a pond fish in southern states.

To me, it just looks like a freak.

And I like the correlation he made between his good action at the pond and ”doesn’t get fished much.”

FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times. The online posting here at https://chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on the wide world of the outdoors.

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