Ice fishing February 3

When you get warm weather in the winter and the ice has not totally firmed up, warmth, wind and rain can wreak havoc on the ice that we had. We had a pond targeted for going after large crappies and when we approached the pond, we were greeted with open water in the main location we wanted to fish. There are two other ponds in the same vicinity and upon viewing them we were greeted with the same results, open water. Headed the truck off to another location as we have a pond that typically is a reliable one for ice conditions and when we arrived we were relieved that we could finally get onto the ice. The conditions were cloudy skies, stiff breeze and mid 20's for temps with snow flakes falling. We setup our lines along the shallows of the shorelines, along an underwater point and a couple in deep water. While the shiners were soaking we drilled a number of holes in the deeper water to look for crappies and sunfish and do some jigging to coax them into biting. After drilling many holes and fishing them all with electronics, was a very rare sight to seeing them void of fish. We had the traps with some action with a small largemouth bass coming from shallow water and also a small pickerel on top of the underwater point. One trap on the point edge had a couple of flags and the line was being spooled off with something making long runs but when time come to setting the hook, nothing was there as the fish must have had the minnow by the head. We have a major snow storm coming in for the latter half of the week so not sure if we will be getting out there, time will tell.