Fishing December 21, 2007

The ice season is definitely here and with all of the snow it is making a tough time to get out to your fishing spots. Without having some sort of a machine to get around on the ice, the latest snow is tough to pull the sleds through and depending on what kind of shape you are in, will depend on how far you are able to travel. We went out to a lake that we haven’t iced fish on before and have done well for panfish in the warmer months. Leaving the access we went around a shallow flat over to a deep shoreline looking for areas that schooling fish are going to hang out in. We proceeded to drill a number of holes but weren’t marking too many fish after moving from hole to hole. The ice conditions that we were finding was that there is a 3-4 inch layer of frozen slush under the 8 inches of snow with a 1-2 inch layer of open water slush with a layer of 3 inches of clear ice underneath that. Being it was Friday there wasn’t anyone else on the ice and with the latest snow made for some very nice scenery while we were fishing. Since the fish were not cooperating in this area and we weren’t to willing to continue on down this shoreline getting further from away from the landing, we decided to turn back and work a flat between us and the landing. This was a good move as when we started working the shallow waters of this flat, this is where we started to find the fish we were looking for. This flat we were working had an inside corner in that area and we had punched 17 holes to get a lay of the land. What we were finding was that the right side of our holes were running on the top edge of this flat and were in 4-5 feet of water. The outside line of holes we had drilled in water depths of 8-11 feet of water and between these two lines the distance was only 20 feet. We drilled a third line of holes in between the other two and these were in 7 feet of water. This was a sharp drop from the upper holes to the deeper holes and after finding out what depth the fish were relating to, it was quickly seen that the deeper holes were void of fish and the other shallow holes, most of these had activity. The sunfish started the bite off and by using a flasher we were able to determine the depth that they were using and made it easier for working them. Once the sunfish bite had started, the crappies started showing up and a majority of them came from 4-5 feet of water. We haven’t been fishing this shallow this season and it was quite fun as you didn’t have to reel them in but just lift the rod and pull the fish out of the hole. For the time we were out there we caught sunfish, crappies and perch and all of the perch were bigger fish up to 11 inches. For the day we caught around 30-40 fish and they didn’t come fast and furious as we had to work at catching all of them. There was only one instance that the activity was fish after fish and we had caught 6 fish in a very short time. There were only two baits that were needed for our fish today, the first one was a WHITE LOBY BAITS MOUSI and was rigged on a 1/32 ounce jighead and the other was the 1/80 ounce T.H.E. JIG in a white/chartreuse color pattern. The LOBY BAITS MOUSI, we only needed that one plastic bait and it is still rigged up and ready to go and that shows you the durability of the LOBY BAITS plastics. We have to give mention to the AUSTIN CUSTOM RODS that we are using and with the sensitivity that is built into these rods, we are able to feel the bites a number of times before they are detected or seen. Since we have started using the AUSTIN CUSTOM RODS we are finding that they are exactly what we were looking for and are going to be the only rods that we use from now on. All in all for all of the work that it took to get us out there on the ice, we had a very enjoyable day and looking forward to our next outing....

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