Things are starting to get dangerous on the ice around Pool 8. Yesterday, ice conditions were great most places that I was at. However, over the course of the night, and today, we have lost about 2 inches of ice since yesterday morning areas with 6″ yesterday are getting to the point of being dangerous now, and places that were running a little thin yesterday, should be pretty much skim or open water in a few days with this weather . The fishing at Stoddard was very slow with a few good keepers coming in every once in a while. We started the day at goose island and i was able to coax a few nice 8+” gills in while site fishing. There were some guys with nice crappies and gills down there, but I’m assuming that they were hitting them early as there wasn’t a lot of action there when we got there. We headed south to Stoddard and got on the ice. Fish were around and biting but you’d have to weed through small ones and action was spotty. Hole hopping was a must. A lot of guys stayed put and caught good numbers of fish, but I felt the need to keep hopping around and I did OK. A few gills that could almost be classified as “bulls” kept me busy on the ultralight. A small verticle jig tipped with a red worm, a black shrimpo tipped with chena bait, or a olive hair jig tipped with chena bait all produced the most fish for me today. I probably could have gone home with around 20 nice gills (i’m not the kind of guy to keep 6″ gills like many of the other guys there, if so, I could have probably caught well over a limit ) Later in the afternoon, Guys started to vacate the area. The ice was getting spongy and wet on top and it wasn’t hard to put the spud through the ice with one hit, even in areas with 5″ of ice I’d like to try my luck on some crappies tomorrow if its not raining, but I think we will be stuck sitting on the docks again, because this ice is no good. The boat will most likely see some h20 next weekend
-Cade