Monday, January 12, 2015

Icefishing, January 11, 2015

Knowing a lot of local anglers can be interesting.  Many people I knew, and many people I didn't know, went icefishing on Saturday, January 10.

Most of the guys I know had an INCREDIBLE day!  I saw their pictures of awesome walleyes, big bass, super-fat perch, and personal-best crappies.

But I didn't go fishing on Saturday.  I went for 4 hours on Sunday.  Before I headed out, I heard from a friend that said nobody was catching anything.  Nobody was even ON the local ponds, whereas the day before there were lots of people out.  Later I heard from guys that fished both days, that Sunday was MUCH SLOWER.

So...I changed my plan to try to icefish for trout, and instead just headed to the same local pond I've been icefishing this season.  Its not even a particularly GOOD pond to icefish.  Its just convenient.

Well, I'm satisfied with my results....no BIG fish were caught, but the numbers were satisfactory.

I started out using a Lindy Frostee spoon tipped with a dead waxworm (cuz I forgot to buy fresh ones during the week).  I caught some fish on that, but the number of strikes and number of fish hooked increased when I switched to a tungsten jig tipped with a waxworm.

I ended up catching over 35 Bluegills, 4 Black Crappies, 1 White Crappie, and 1 Largemouth Bass.




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I forgot to mention....the ice the previous Saturday was 5" thick.  It was very cold all week.  This Sunday (8 days later), the ice had improved to 9" thick!!

5 comments:

  1. Dave
    Some nice fillets there, with hushpuppies, fries, cold slaw and of course a coors--thanks for sharing

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    1. I don't keep any...but crappies ARE quite tasty. :) And they are generally fairly prolific breeders, so folks don't usually need to worry about damaging the population by keeping some for the table. In fact...keeping some probably does the population more GOOD than bad.

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  2. Disgustingly good, Dave..............

    Wish I had enough ice to stick my rod through a whole and catch fish like that......

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    1. Ha! :) Speaking of disgusting....you should have seen the pictures my friends posted from the previous day. Incredible fish of almost every species. For whatever reason, it was an amazing day for fishing. 16" Crappies, 25" Walleyes, 12" Perch, 10" Bluegills...To have one or two big fish caught on a given day is special. But to have that many different people fishing different bodies of water and catching THAT MANY jumbos... was something else altogether. We have no explanation...the weather wasn't significantly different, and the barometer was steady both days.

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    2. Dave, there is no explanation for that..................
      Simply put, "That is why we go fishing".

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