Combine good travel conditions, with nice weather and biting fish and we’ve got the recipe for another great weekend in the Grand Rapids area. Most of the snow has melted or compacted and travel by truck is excellent on the main lake portions of most of our area lakes. We found that the melting has reduced ice thickness by about 4-6 inches as of 3-24-04, leaving us with enough to drive on for the present time. But, there has been enough run off to begin making open water in some of the high current areas. Avoid spots in narrows or near rivers and streams.
The past week has brought reports of good Bluegill fishing on the area lakes. Shallow drop-off areas adjacent to traditional deep winter holes are good areas to check. Compact jigs like a glow bug or fat boy tipped with grubs and wax worms will produce some nice fish. Moving often is the best approach, until you find one of the better schools of fish.
Crappies are still using the deeper holes, but now there are some nice schools of fish using the weedy flats as well. One report I got last week was from a group that were catching crappies over a deep weed bed, suspended just a few feet below the ice.
Perch fishing has continued to be strong in the area, with a noticeable shift toward the shallow areas for these fish too. We fished yesterday from about 6 feet of water down to a maximum of 12 feet. The best overall average depth was 9 to 10 feet. Whether it was due to the sudden warm up or because of the fish being located in shallow water, we really struggled to catch fish during the-mid day. We found several areas where we could see two or three fish at a time on our electronics, but only had an occasional bite. As the sun began to go down, we experienced a “Walleye-like” run of fish from about 6:00 PM until 7:00 PM. There were a lot of rigs on the lake that were leaving between 1:00 and 3:00 PM suggesting that maybe there had also been a good morning run of fish. We had our best luck using jigging spoons with Green/Orange/Glow combinations out producing other colors.
I will be out of the action next week while I attempt to get educated at a leadership retreat. So this may well be my last ice fishing report of the winter. If it is, good luck with your fishing and check back in during the first week of April when hopefully, I’ll be posting some updates on fishing the Rainy River and some of our early open water Crappie spots.