I am getting fishing to come screaming up off the bottom but getting them to actually hit my jig is another story. Does anyone have any tips to get panfish to hit their baits after they get them threee to four feet of the bottom. I am mainly using plastics by the way
Always stay above them and keep working them and try at different speeds. If you get the active fish to bite and then keep moving trying to find active fish. Also depending upon how deep your fishing done use a split shot it takes away from the jig movement.
If this is happening all the time something is wrong. Might want to check if your bait is spinning after you jig it. Adding a swivel and a short leader will help that. You may already know that but it’s something that has happened to me before as well.
Make sure they are actual gills with a camera, lots of time fish that race up and don’t commit are small perch.
They are curious, they are active, but when they come get a closer look they don’t like whats going on. Change lure until you find what they like. I would tend to stay with at least partially of whichever color they are seeing coming up at it.
Imagine a delicious cheeseburger floating above you, you’re like nice, I’m hungry let’s go grab it, only to find out when you get up to er it’s tofu, blah. Give em them beef
Possibly downsize. Sounds like micro perch or dinks… As stated a camera is the only way to be sure. This is why it’s ice fishing and not ice catching LOL.
Yea, not the answer you might be looking for, but if you are not moving around too much get a camera and watch.
When I am not moving holes, or things are slow, I catch way more fish with a camera then a vex.
Make sure they are actual gills with a camera, lots of time fish that race up and don’t commit are small perch.
This is what I’m thinking as well. The times I’ve had mature gills race up to a bait, ever, are far and few between. They usually move very methodically to a bait but 4-inch perch are notorious for doing the dart up and reject.
Downsize and try spikes
imagine a delicious cheeseburger floating above you, you’re like nice, I’m hungry let’s go grab it, only to find out when you get up to er it’s tofu, blah. Give em them beef
Beef, its what’s for dinner. Until that little bugger bites, than it is fish.
I think Mr.Holst and Muskychaser have it down pat. Those small perch are a bane. So are shiners and they’ll perform this dance too.
Why target fish on the bottom anyway? Search the mid-levels of the water column a for marks that are there and then gone. Then there and gone again. When these marks are noted just fish slightly higher up than the depth the marks are at. Fish at mid-column are much more likely to be hunting for food and will often reward you with much more size. Those on the bottom are negative or neutral mooded and are tough to get to hit, and then in many instances are very small fish.
Those sound like candy-bar-sized perch. That’s how they act.
To get panfish to commit in general, I’ve had luck with slowly raising the bait up a few inches just as they’re about to reach it. Sometimes speeding up the jigging cadence a little as you raise it up can seal the deal.
If this is happening all the time something is wrong. Might want to check if your bait is spinning after you jig it. Adding a swivel and a short leader will help that. You may already know that but it’s something that has happened to me before as well.
I agree that it could be small perch too but then even they will take a thump at your offering from time to time.
targaman here is pointing out another likely problem with the spinning jig. It wasn’t until I got a camera that I could see the bait spinning with each rise and drop. If you have camera you can see what your bait is doing as well as what fish are down there.
I’ll run into that with pressured crappies.
Here is an old article I wrote that addresses some of it
We can speculate all we want on what they are, but personally I still want to know exactly what they are, and since alot of guys here including myself don’t have a camera I have to figure it out by catching them.
I fish alot of new water, so figuring out the forage species, the coloring of the baitfish, heck even catching a 6″ shiner would be sweet! Really helps to get the right profile and colored baits down there.
We can speculate all we want on what they are, but personally and since alot of guys here including myself don’t have a camera I have to figure it out by catching them.
You didn’t get that new Marcum camera I sent you for Christmas? 
You didn’t get that new Marcum camera I sent you for Christmas?
It was just a 5, and not the plus model so I sent it back 
Even I have standards man 
Like other have said. Keep the bait above the fish and keep it moving. I only allow the fish a few seconds to take the bait once it reaches it. If no bite, move it another 6″ or so above the fish. Most often a fish will have a limit of how high off the bottom they will come prior to either taking the bait or dropping back down to the bottom. Another trick I sometimes try is if the fish wont take it is to reel it up near top and slowly drop it back down. Never drop all the way to the fish. also stop above the fish and make it rise to the bait. Another thing may be that some of those fish you think are note biting are biting – but you just are not seeing it. As I posted several times in other post, Some times the only way to detect a REALLY lite bite is with a sensitive spring bobber. Last Friday I and a Buddy were out and had the same situation as you. With the spring bobber I managed 19 Keeper fish. My buddy fishing the same area only managed 2. Several times when he had fish marked and could not catch them he would call me over and I’d be a able to catch them 80-90% of the time. At the end instead of me catching them I would walk over and give him my spring bobber rod and coach him how to catch them. After catching 5 fish in a row on my rod from a hole that he spent 20 minutes trying to catch fish on his rod, he finally became a believer that he was missing the bite on his rod.
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