Well, the Ice Cats venture for early 2016 is over. I had some success every time I went out this year for Ice Cats. Our best day was in the middle of February, we managed to put about 30 on the ice. It was at a local spot here in Cedar Rapids with a couple friends. Cold and windy that day, glad I bought an Eskimo insulated tent to sit in to get out of the wind and warm up.
Some of the things I learned this season. Our best presentation was dead sticking on or near the bottom. But we were successful with bait suspended up to 2 feet off the bottom as well as jigging for them. Jigging was by far the most fun…watching the Vex screen turn completely red around your bait, then a tap and it was on.
Not many nibblers. Seemed like if they were biting, they wanted it. Sometimes they would really slam it and others they would pick up the bait and run sideways…you could see the line moving sideways in the hole. If I ever had a bite but no hook up, I could drop the bait back down and jig the bait and the fish would return to bite again…at least I’m assuming it was the same fish.
We’d open a number of holes, drop our Vex in and if we marked any fish at all, we’d drop a line down. If we marked suspended bait, we’d drop our lines in. Sometimes in those situations, we’d get bit right away, sometimes not. But generally, if we marked fish, we’d hook up eventually.
As far as structure, the cats didn’t seem to care much about it. Although we did catch most of our biggest in the deeper water with a flat bottom. We did catch a lot where the bottom had a rise going from deep to shallow. Didn’t really have much luck in the shallows but more like the breaks. Brush sure didn’t seem to matter at all.
Bait was important. We started with fresh cut gills, and fathead minnows. We tried some frozen shad leftover from last fall that worked well too. Finally had out best luck with frozen shad guts. That proved to be out best producer. But all of the baits we used worked very well. One thing in common with all these baits were size…it seemed the smaller pieces worked better, or at least we got more hook ups with smaller baits.
We fished a couple local spots here and made a couple trips to Mendota. Did extremely well locally and well on Mendota. We only used cut gills and fatheads at Mendota, never tried shad guts. It did seem that fresher was better there though. Bloody baits were best. A medium sized bait worked well on Mendota but that may have been because the Ice Cats on Mendota were so much bigger. We got a couple over 20 pounds through the ice and I’d guess an average was around 12 pounds. Here in my local waters, 8 pounds was about the biggest with a lot in the 3-4 pound range…great eaters.
All in all, it was a very successful Ice Cats season. I learned a lot, caught a lot and had a lot of fun trying and experimenting. The ice is off the river here now so it’s time for Ice Out Cats. Gotta go catch some fresh shad and chubs for cut bait and hit the river.
Good luck to everyone and maybe you can get a few tips from this to use next year for Ice Cats in your area.
L8R…Ken
