Ice fishing Massachusetts 1/25/14

Was nice to see that the week was going to be very cold again and what that does is freeze up all of the shorelines of local ponds that had opened up from the previous weeks warm weather. With that, I was able to get onto a pond that we haven't been to in a couple of years just because it is the last one to freeze up and the first one to open up. Upon arriving at the pond, there were cloudy skies, a stiff wind and the air temps were in the upper 30's. There weren't any other anglers out there and you could also see that there were no holes drilled in the ice anywhere I was fishing. This particular pond has some very nice crappies in it up to 14-15 inches in length. For a small body of water, that is fairly impressive and you usually don't see that other than in bigger bodies of water. I generally fish this pond where others generally don't go and the water depth there is around 20 feet of water. After drilling a number of holes in a few locations, there was only a few that consistently held fish for the time that I was out there. The bait of choice was the Northland Mooska tungsten jig in the 1/57 oz size and tipped that with a couple of Euro Larvae for added enticement. Generally from fishing these depths you can gauge the size of the fish by where it is swimming in the water column. If they were near the bottom to two feet off, these generally were smaller crappies and more times than not, sunfish. But, when the marks on the electronics flash at 14 feet, you quickly reel your bait to that level and the fish that you are catching there, are always the bigger varieties of crappies and the biggest ones that were caught were the 13 inch size. You usually won't catch a lot of them but the ones you catch are definitely the funniest and those are the ones that keep you coming back. The real key to catching these bigger fish always comes back to fishing and using the electronics to see where the fish are at because without that, you would miss a good quantity of these nicer fish.
So until next time, TIGHT LINES