Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Ice Fishing Massachusetts 2/9/14

Conditions: Partly cloudy skies, upper 20's air temperature and light winds.

After the previous day of not finding the crappies that we were looking for, we decided to head to a pond that we frequent that has some very nice crappie in as well. Of course this pond has a good amount of snow on also and made it tough getting around on the ice. Another issue that we had to deal with was there was a fair amount of slush under the snow and some areas you were standing in water while fishing. We ran our lines in water depths from 5-6 feet of water out into 12 feet of water and that allowed us to cover a wide variety of water depths. Once those allotted lines were set, we moved out into 18 feet of water as the crappie generally will suspend around twelve feet deep. One nice thing about the crappie in this pond is that when there are fish on the flashers and they are at 12 feet down, you already know that those are the crappie swimming through. We drilled holes all over the ice and were only able to locate and catch one lone crappie but it was a nice fish at 12 inches long. It was caught on a Northland Tackle Mooska Tungsten jig that was tipped with a couple of Euro Larva for added bait attractant. While jigging we had another very exciting moment as we had a good fish go through and strike and the battle was on. We were hoping that it was one of the giant crappie that live in the lake but after an exhausting battle, we finally seen that it was a big largemouth bass. As I was bringing it to the hole, instead of its nose coming up the hole, the fish went sideways underneath the hole and at that point the line snapped and the fish was gone. That fish really gave a great battle and it is always nice to get your hands on them, but at least we were able to see it and it was definitely very nice. We were able to jig up some sunfish and perch as well but the jig bite just wasn't going to be happening on this trip. But, the other lines were very lively for the day as there were a number of largemouth and pickerel caught and it always made for an exciting battle when they would bite. All in all for the day we probably caught 20-30 fish between the 5 species that we caught that day. As we were packing up as the sun was setting, one of the lines that never let us know there was a fish there, had our biggest largemouth of the day and was a solid 3.5-4 pound fish. For the conditions of snow and slush, we had a great time out there and should be able to get onto this pond again before the ice starts its thawing process.

The next trip will probably find us in New Hampshire again at a lake that we frequent quite often but haven't been to it yet this year.

So till next time, may your lines be tight and handle those fish with care and release what you don't need so that others can enjoy that experience as well...




 

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