Lake Sangchris, near Springfield IL
| What a lake !!! Early spring and late Fall are the times to fish this powerplant lake. Thanks to the powerplant, this lake has high water temperatures and during the summer it grows hundreds of acres of the most obnoxious Amazon River style Lilypads that you have ever seen. These pads provide a cool water sanctuary for the fish during the warm weather, and are completely unfishable as they blanket the surface and then rise up another two feet above the water. |
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| 5.0 and 5.1 pound twins |
How I fish Sangchris:
Early Spring and late Fall means easy Bass on this lake. Get some white and gold spinnerbaits, some shallow shad raps, 20 pound braided line and head right for the lilypad stalks. Look for shad flipping around in the backs of coves and dive right in !!! Don't be afraid to get shallow, even when the water is cold. Tip your motor up, use the wind to your advantage, and go easy on the trolling motor, as you work the 1 to 4 foot zone, and you will boat some nice fish. Good Luck !!!!
Click Here for some old Sangchris Fishing Reports
This paragraph is from the Illinois DNR Bass Fisheries Report :
LAKE SANGCHRIS - This 2,234 acre lake continues to be one of the best bass lakes in the state. We collected 73 bass per hour of electrofishing during the Fall 2002 sample. For the past fifteen years the average number collected approaches 100 bass per hour, so we were down slightly this year. That doesn’t necessarily mean the bass population has gone down by 27%. Sampling errors caused by weather, power plant operation or any number of things may effect the number of fish collected on any given day. Sixty-four percent (64%) of the bass collected were over 15" and 5.6% of the bass were over 18". One point of concern was that many of the bass we collected were in poor body condition. Lake Sangchris normally produces bass in excellent body condition except for those bass in the 8"-15" range. This year however, a few bass of all size ranges were in poor condition. In spite of the best shad spawn we have seen in nearly 20 years. I don’t know why we would collect a 15" bass in excellent condition and in the same electrofishing run another 15" bass that was skinny. We did note that the fish nearest the hot-water ditch were skinny and as we moved away from the ditch around into the west arm the fish’s body conditions improved. One possible explanation is that power plant operation this past Summer created high water temperatures that burned calories faster than the fish could acquire them. In would be interesting to see if the bass are in better condition in the Spring. We conducted a creel survey (angler interview survey) in 1998 and 2000 with the data tabulated only recently. From that survey we see that 126,920 bass were caught in 1998 and only 2607 (2%) were harvested (taken home). In 2000, a drought year, those numbers were down significantly. Only 69,096 bass were caught. Of that, 2294 were harvested. In 1998 59 fish per acre of water were caught and only 1 taken home which averaged 3.2 pounds.
