Macbride/Coralville Ramp Ice Report

This will be my last ice report of the year for Johnson County, and my first open water report. I had some errands to run this morning, so while I was out and about I checked the conditions on Macbride and the upper end of Coralville res., since the ponds around Coralville and North Liberty are pretty much all open.

The area of the the res. around Mid-River Marina and Mehaffey Bridge still has a fair amount of ice on it–I would call it about 50% open water. The floodplain above the 965 and I-80 bridges is about two thirds open, with ice still covering the water along both shorelines. I did not check any of the ramps on the reservoir, so I don’t know if they are accessible or not.

Macbride is still mostly iced over, although there are some sizable patches of open water. The ramp on the south side of the south arm is open, with a fair bit of soft water in front of it, but as of today there is still ice blocking access from there to the causeway. The area east of the causeway is mostly open. The sailboat ramp on the north arm is also open, as is a good-sized patch of water around it. The ramp directly east across the lake from the swimming beach and boat rental place is still locked up. I did not check any of the other ramps.

With the weather forecast for the week (rain and highs close to fifty), this coming weekend should be the time to start checking the ice-out channel cat and crappie bite around IC.

I fished the Coralville floodplain for a couple hours yesterday morning–the ice is entirely gone there, and the channel cat were hitting fairly well. I got five right in the river channel on sour shad guts, which they preferred over fresher ones. Fishing outside the channel in the really shallow water did not produce. The other boats I talked to reported about the same things.

This morning, I put in on the south arm of Macbride, which is all but completely open. I checked the really shallow water along the north shoreline, but the fish seem to be holding in their winter patterns yet. That is to say I didn’t find any fish in the shallows, and marked fish holding over deeper cover where they were three weeks ago. I had no success in getting anything to bite. There is still ice around the powerline area, but it looked pretty rotten.

The big excitement of my Macbride trip came at the ramp as I was loading up. I didn’t have my truck’s emergency brake all the way down, so when I put my boat on the trailer the whole rig started to slowly roll in to the water. I was in the boat when this happened, so I jumped out, got in the truck, and stopped it before it ended up submerged. Then the boat, which I had not had time to hook to the wench, floated off the trailer. So I plunged into the drink up to my waist and grabbed the boat before it got away from me. Did I mention that the surface temps were between forty and forty-two degrees? Shrinkage!

Great post. Us folks down in davenport have been itching to get up to McBride. Its a heck of a drive to go look at a frozen lake. Thanks, and keep’em coming.