12/10/05 Stoddard Gill Fest!

Well, after participating in making fruit baskets today down at the rotary lights warehouse, my dad and i went down to stoddard to check it out. As we were pulling the shanty over the tracks, some nice dude was pulling off and he told us that we were gonna have fun. He went on to describe exactly where he was and told us to check it out. He showed us his LIMIT of monster gills which he caught in 2-1/2 hours so we were syked at this point. Sure enough, we found the exact hole that he described and i dropped the line down there to make sure he was telling the truth and bam! caught a fish. I caught 2 more before my dad even had the shanty set up. We set up on the holes and we just had a blast. We stayed in the shanty the entire time, as did most, except for a few old timers that were on their buckets. We caught about 65-70 gills and we kept 16 for the pan, but could have easily kept a 2 man limit. We let go all fish under 8 inches. There were also about 10 8-9 inchers that we let go after we already had plenty for a meal on the ice. Mix that in with several dropped fish back down the hole, and that sounds about right to me. the fish were just beautiful and it was a great time. I of course, had to experiment. I used plastics and they hit any type of plastic/color that i dropped at them. At one point, a fish cleaned my waxie off on my drop shot set up and i just left it and sure enough, fish were still hitting both the lil mic and the jig. It was a hoot guys, get out there and enjoy it. I got plenty of pics too, so make sure to check those out! Good luck
PS- we were on 5-6″ of ice

heres one of the first dandys of the day.

heres my biggest, a 9-1/2 incher that was 2 inches thick, and 5 inches wide!

heres my dad with a nice 8-1/2 incher

Holy Buckets!
The biggest is right on top…may just look at that thing!

heres the catch

heres 3 of the biggest…..Yea it was a great day..you get the picture now i think!

LOOK AT THOSE PIGGIES! way to go, im hitting the hard water tomorrow. nice looking gills i hope to find some that size tomorrow aswell.

Thanks for the report and pics Cade. Looks like you guys had a blast catching alot of gills. What was the ”hottest” bait for today?

Thanks, Bill

bill, didn’t really seem to matter. Although they seemed to grab my green little mic alot quicker than they did with the other jigs.

I got to hit up Stoddard for a few hours this morning. I met Bret and 2 of his buddies out there at 6:30 this morning. Bret then led us on a looooooong walk across the ice in the dark. For awhile I was wondering if he was lost Bret and Jim drilled a pile of holes and we got all the traps set up and commenced to fishing. We had our own little Trap Attack going on out there While it was still dark, the fish were a little slow, but they were definitely there. Once daylight rolled around, it was some excellent fishing going on for all of us. Lntony and his brother-in-law came out a little later to join us as well. I can’t even begin to count the total number of fish I caught in thefew hours I was there , many were just under keeper size, but it was still a blast. Of course when you are talking about Stoddard, keeper size is different than most of the areas around LAX. I was throwing back 7-8″ fish because there are true hogs out there. I started off the day with plastics and Lil Mics with no bait. You had to keep switching it up to keep the fish hitting. After so many fish on a certain bait, the fish would snif it and back away. When you dropped something else down they would hammer it. I actually only used 2 different baits, but kept switching back and forth. It was an awesome morning. I am sure Bret and the rest of the guys will be reporting their day as well. I am sure they all had a great day

It was a blast It was great to meet finaly meet Lntony also

Most my keepers came on a purple ant from 7:00 until around 9:00. The bite tappered off for me so I swith to a black ant. This put some more nice fish in the bucket. I kept a total of 15 nice gills. The bite cost me 3 tins of waxies

The fish were hanging in 4-5fow. Most my hits were half way down.
Good luck fishing people

It was a good day on the ice.Great too meet Bret and crew,Wats and Bret put my brother inlaw and i on some nice fish .We took home 27 fat gills.Thanks a million guys ,for putting us on the fish.Any ideas on how too patch my shack,that thing looked liked a block of swiss cheese .It also smelled like mice wizz o’well time to buy a new one.

Thanks Again Bret. I had a great time. My brother and I meet Bret and AmWatson in Stoddard at 6:30. The walk out this morning seemed shorter that the walk back, but it was worth it. I ended up with 22 nice Gills and I believe my brother ended up with 19. It’s always nice to ut fish your brother.

As always, Bret put us on fish and always made sure everyone was getting fish.

Nice meeting you Jim Bret definitely knows where the fish are all the time Hope to see you guys out there or somewhere again

went to stoddard today as well. About the same report as the rest, caight some dandy gills, also the biggest to date for me, just shy of 10 inches. I was using glow-eze jiogs, color didn’t seem to matter too much, but did do some switching. all in all a good day. next time we will have ot meet up guys, seems like alot of us there today. john

guys, we gotta let each other know when we are going out from now on! sheesh. I was out today as well with casey goode..sounds like a lot of Ida’ers down there. Bret, i looked for you but didnt see you. Wats must have already been gone anyway because we didnt get out til 130. Were you guys all the way out or were you in the first group? we caught a crap load once we got on them. It really picked up from about 3:30-4:45…at 3 we had 2 fish on the ice. By 4:30 we had 26 8+ inch fish! At first, we were only on tiny bass and gills but we moved and found a couple of hot holes and bam…look for my new post, but i have to eat first!