Stoddard Bluegills 12/20/06

I was invited today during school to go down to Stoddard to try a little ice fishing, and since we get out of school at 2:10 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I thought it was an awesome idea! We got our gear and got on the ice around 2:45. It didn’t seem like anyone was really catching much but the fish were loaded up everywhere in the weeds on my flasher and camera. I didn’t use the camera much because I found that you had to be somewhat mobile to keep catching the better sized fish. Justin found a real good set of holes and we started slaying fish left and right. I was using an olive colored hair jig tipped with a waxie and justin was taking full advantage of the new diamond jig from Custom jigs and spins in yellow/orange to catch his fish. We did OK, but still the dink/keeper ratio is not where I want it to be. I was happy with it, being the first time out at Stoddard, but its not what it was last year first ice. Between 4 guys, we could have kept around 25-30 good sized gills. I mean over 8″. There were a lot of nice 8-1/2 inch class fish coming in, but nothing hoggish like the 9-10″ we had hopes of All in all, a fun time for sure.
Now to talk about Ice condition…I gotta give it an A++++ I couldn’t believe how well it was holding up, at the shore, and all the way out in the back. We didn’t go out to the back or between the islands, but there were a ton of guys back there. With the time we had, we figured it was in best interest to stay closer. we had 5″ and maybe even up to 6″ with hardly any cracking and no water on top.
Good fun!
Get out there and enjoy it!

Cade

I’m heading down to my moms house for the Christmas weekend. She lives in LaCrescent. She just moved down there, and doesn’t know much about the local lakes. Any suggestions of where I could to pass a few hours this weekend? Where is this lake Stoddard, how far is it from LaCresent, do you know? I don’t really care what I catch, eyes, perch, gills, whatever. No need to put me on your hot spots or anything, just wanna get on the ice!

Blue lake is a good spot to try. Its the area between LaCrescent and the blue bridges in La Crosse. I don’t know how the ice is, or the bite, but that spot gets a lot of rave from first ice fisherman. Might be a place to check out. Stoddard is a city in wisconsin, south of La Crosse. ITs on the Mississippi River. Its no lake, but Its a large open area with an amazing abundance of vegetation (coontail, eelgrass, lilypads, and arroheads) there are channels that run between them with deeper 5-10 foot of water and these can be awesome for BULLS. send me a pm for more info. Good luck