Darrin Marcure poses with a bruiser bluegill. Photo by Ted Peck

Imagine catching a bluegill so big that it sticks out an honest 2 inches from either side of your outstretched hands. I caught three 'gills with roughly these dimensions on West Okoboji Lake one afternoon. The experience honestly and profoundly changed my life forever.

These were my very first fish. The year was 1955. From that point forward, I was hooked on fishing -- decades before the cliché became a national catchphrase. More than a half-century later, West Okoboji is still a destination for big bluegills. If I should catch one there this summer that sticks out an honest 2 inches from either side of these freckled, weathered paws, the next stop will be at a taxidermy shop.

This fish would be the "alpha 'gill" -- probably a new state record, destined for the den wall rather than a dinner plate. I've never caught a foot-long bluegill, although many thousands of smaller specimens have flopped around at my feet on the ice and in the boat since 1955.

Two years ago an 11-year-old girl from Wisconsin wrestled an 11 5/8 inch 'gill into my Lund over on Mississippi River Pool 9. This whopper hit a chrome/blue Rat-L-Trap that was intended for a bass below a wing dam.

It wasn't Stacy's first fish, but that bluegill will certainly be one she remembers for a long, long time. The smile on my face was almost as broad as the Cheshire-cat grin that the kid was wearing as she ran to ask everybody at the boat launch to look at her fish.

The Mississippi certainly has the potential for putting your name in the record books with a broad-shouldered bluegill. Old Man River is by far our best all-species fishin' hole. Pools 9 and 10 certainly rate in the top 20 fishing spots in the continental United States -- but on most days, you may have to move a half-dozen times, and sort through 100 bluegills to catch a mess bigger than a man's hand.

Catching 100 bluegills of any size is better than a sharp stick in the eye any day of the week. This feat is possible on countless waters across Iowa. We have more bluegills than cornstalks. The key is finding those places and employing tactics with the best potential for producing a bucketful of bulls.

A good place to begin would be to understand how this prey species plugs into the hierarchy of a typical watery ecosystem. Bluegills are prolific breeders, with an adult pair laying almost a quarter-million eggs per spawn. Spawning can occur two or even three times over the course of a summer, always in conjunction with the full-moon period.

We don't have much in the way of high and low tides in the Hawkeye State, but even as tides are influenced by the moon, so are spawning and angling success -- even this far from the ocean.