Some lakes will support a night bite along with a day bite while others yet will offer better low light fishing for crappies and panfish. Two things stick out here that would guide my fishing during the ice period.
First, crappies and sunfish will seek out the deepest water during the winter as it is likely the most stable and will offer what they need in food and comfort moreso than will the shallower water so the shallow end might not be the best to fish under ice. The second thing is those trees mentioned….they are absolute crappie and sunfish magnets especially if they are standing, not blow-downs.
If I were fishing this lake, I’d pass on low light fishing since you’ve pretty much found that the shut down occurs with sun down. I would not expect to see a good low light fishery unless there was little snow cover on the ice and fishing at night was done under a full moon and three days on either side of it. And all of my angling would be focused on those trees.
I’d find trees that extended down into the deeper water, drill a ring of say four holes fairly close to the trunk of each tree standing out of the water [no more than a foot off the trunk], and do so on maybe six or eight trees before I even dropped a line. I’d go back to the first holes and start fishing, starting quite high in the water column and jigging, my way down to the bottom. At some point I’d hit fish. If they were small I’d focus either higher or lower than where those smaller fish are hitting in the column, move to a different hole on that trunk and start jigging down again, and if they were all small I’d shift to the next tree that was drilled. The idea here is to fish from the top down so you’re not disturbing fish below where they begin to hit. Often times crappies will stratify by size and the larger fish will be higher o r lower than smaller fish and they may simply be on the other side of the trunk….maybe a shade line is there that they’re comfortable in while feeding. Crappies and sunfish will work a stick-up like this picking insects that are daytime active and will literally pick bugs from top to bottom. The insect forage that holds these fish thru the day likely in not active at night and those fish will simple settle right on the bottom and rest thru the darker hour. As morning approaches the crappies will be the first to show activity, followed a couple hours later by sunfish. This area would be a certain focus for me until the ice is really starting to look iffy, then I’s start checking the cattail fringes during the afternoon periods until evening dark.
The shallower water under the ice will warm during the daytime and if the sun is strong on the ice so much the better. This daily trend of warming water in the daylight to cooling water in the night will pull crappies and sunfish towards the warmer portions because they #1, are more comfortable in the three or four degree warmer water and #2, their shift in forage starts with that warm water cycle and they feed better in the warmer water. [Mentioning warmer water here, those standing tree trunks will usually provide water a degree or two warmer during even the coldest portion of winter, hence the holes drilled so close to the trunks.]
Crappie size in this lake may be a genetic thing. They may simply be genetically unable to attain a large size, however if random catches of larger fish suggest that larger fish may be there in numbers, then its a game to locate them and that will bring you back to the top to bottom strategy and the suggestion that crappies stratify by size, something they are notorious for. I always assume that the larger crappies in any body of water will occupy that portion which offers comfort, food, and security and will aggressively push smaller fish out of that little world. This band of water may be only a couple feet thick so landing inside is your challenge. Be very diligent in noting where your fish are hitting in the water column, depth-wise. Every strike note the water depth. When a larger fish has hit the ice go right back to that exact depth and work it. Chances are as good as not that larger fish will reward you.
When you are getting plenty of crappies action on so-so sized fish on a certain color of jig/plastic/bait, try changing to an opposite color for a while. If lesser sized fish are being displaced they may be in an area where light is making your current bait very easy for them to find and if the larger fish are deeper or in a shaded area the color they need to see may be entirely different.
When I was young I’d have loved to fish this lake as I think it offers some super potential, but just needs to be worked in a way that can find the separation between any larger and smaller fish.
