Made it on the ice today with my friend Carson ( who will hopefully make his first post here today..) for some bluegill action. The original plan was to fish some deep water for crappies, but that did not pan out as I fished there last night with Justin P. and only caught small gills and crappies with only a few good ones. With word of a decent bite going on at Stoddard, I decided to go check it out. Normally I wouldn’t disclose the location, but its no secret…There were probably 80+ guys out and even a few 4 wheelers zipping around. We found an officially measured 8″ of ice in the channel closest to the highway…But the second channel between the islands probably had around 6″…The fishing started out pretty good in the morning, with not much traffic yet on the ice. I was using purple at first, but carson was catching them on orange so I made the switch and got into them myself. I caught a nice mess of gills around 9″ which were a nice addition to Carson’s own pile of fish. The flurry of activity was enough to fill carson’s bag with 21 gills over 8-1/2 inches, anything less than that was back down the hole we released countless numbers of 7-8 inchers, but around 1 in the afternoon, things started to taper off, before picking back up again, but this time, they were all under 7 inches It was time to go home and the day was done. But it was a great time! Fish were holding near bottom. The technique was to start the jig about 2 feet under the ice and slowly lower it down to the bottom in 6 feet while continuously twitching the spring bobber on the way down. Fish would come up to meet the bait, and then you would work them from there. I know one thing was for sure..I had way more lookers than takers!
above is a pic of my biggest gill, a whopper 9-1/4″ that took a orange/red “flu flu” ice jig from custom jigs and spins..
Good luck,
Cade