Brian Athern and Ricardo Rodriguez were fishing smallmouth bass on Hickory Creek in the southwest suburbs when Athern caught a surprise, “Bonus kamikaze bluegill I caught slurping cicadas from the shallows.”
Nice turn of phrase and it came with a fish story.
“I spotted a disturbance about 10 feet from me under a tree while picking my line from the front treble-hook split-ring and decided to downsize,” Athern said. “Boom, two casts later.”
Using different baits, including Athern’s home-painted cicada lures, he and Rodriguez did well on smallmouth bass with bonuses such as the bluegill and rock bass.
“They’re gorging on cicadas and midge flies,” Athern noted.
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.
To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), X (@BowmanOutside), Instagram (@BowmanOutside) or Bluesky (@BowmanOutside.bsky.social).
