We ventured out onto our favorite winter pond this day and with the spud bar in hand and the ice picks around our neck we found very favorable ice for our latest ice fishing adventure. The total ice thickness was around 12 inches with the top layer of 6 inches of frozen snow and the rest being hard ice. The thickness that we had now was thicker than we have had all winter and we should be set now for the rest of the winter with the cold temperatures coming in this week.
Since the snow has melted from the surface of the ice, this made for easy travels around searching for our fish today. Drilled a few holes right away and concentrated in depths from 13 – 18 feet of water. On this particular pond this area that we fish is the deepest hole of the lake and we always figure that there are going to be concentrations of fish here and usually are never disappointed at that.
Our game plan for this day was to fish for crappies and sunfish but at the same time we were going to jig for some bass as well. Upon dropping the transducer of our Vexilar down the first hole we were marking fish and dropped the Chubby Darter down and a couple of jigs later had the first bass on ice. Unfortunately since this fish had hammered the bait and taken it fairly deep we easily worked the hooks out and quickly released this bass back into the water unharmed. We tried a little more with the Chubby Darter but were more focused on searching for panfish and concentrated our efforts more towards them.
The plan that we generally use is drill around 20 holes in a circular pattern and once that is done then we will start hole jumping until we find active fish. As time goes by we generally find that there are only a few holes that are very productive and that were this case this day as well. The fish that we were marking were suspended from 3 feet to 9 feet off of the bottom and if we were to see the higher fish those were of a much bigger size. We had caught a number of fish but a majority of these were in the 4 – 6 inch range and we haven’t seen this many small crappies in this location ever.
After weeding our way through a number of fish we were able to bring home a few for a small fish fry and they were greatly appreciated on the dinner plate. The fish that were caught were caught on the Loby Baits Mousi in the white color and also others were caught on a yellow/orange T.H.E. Jig which we are finding as a popular color on this particular pond. The lift method was used on all of the fish that were caught and if they were reluctant to bite after working them for a few minutes then we would move onto the next hole.
We had figured that the bite would be much easier than it was as a small storm front was going to be coming through the area and the temperatures are falling as well. But that didn’t seem to matter as the fish were there and fish were caught but the numbers of fish that we did catch were worked for and were not going to come easily. Now that we are getting our ice forming more firmly these days this is going to open many more avenues for us and start looking for more reports from us and we are going to start venturing to lakes and ponds that haven’t been visited yet this winter.
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