Fishing Mar 16 2008

I wanted to get out and fish our best crappie lake and we had checked the ice on Friday and there was 6-7 inches at that time. Upon arriving there on Sunday I noticed that there was an open water channel through the middle of the pond and wasn’t about to try getting out on that. I checked two other lakes in that area and they were in the same condition, unsafe.

Finally made it back to our backup pond and there was around 9 inches of ice there but the first 4 inches is all honeycombed and soft. Hoping that the bite was going to be better because of the late season I had punched a number of holes in varying depths and proceeded to fish. First hole produced a nice sunfish right away and figured that this was going to be the way the day was going to go. Well it didn’t take long and a number of holes later I was right back to having to really work at getting the bites going.

Over the course of a few hours I had drilled at least 60 holes over a good 1/3 of the lake and varying the water depths from 8 feet out to 19 feet. The best action was in the shallower waters but the size was nothing to write home about. Anything of size was in the deeper water and ended up going back to where I had started to see if I could find anything better. The baits that were used were CKOutdoors T.H.E. Jig and also used the Loby Baits Maki. The bite was somewhat of a light bite and a number of times you didn’t even known that they had the bait in their mouth.

I was hoping that this was going to be one of those days that the bigger fish start showing themselves as we are getting towards spring and their activity will start picking up. But, lately this seems to be the norm and working to catch fish is getting to be a regular thing. This ice season is now in the books as the next outing will be on open water. We had a great season and one of the longest ones that I can remember and I was fortunate to be able to travel to MN and ice fish there as well. I have learned a lot over the course of this ice season and I am already pumped for next ice season as I am not ready to give it up yet.

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