What a frigid outing on pool 8 I had today. With temps peaking at about 0, it was pretty brutal making our way across the ice to where we were planning on fishing. Finally, the shanty was up and the heater was aflame. I promptly banked in the shanty with snow and sat down. By the time I had 1 fish on the ice, Justin had already iced 5 because I was dealing with other issues like frozen minnows in the bucket, banking the shanty in, and scooping out my ice holes. Finally I was able to settle in and get set up with my Lx-3 and aqua-vu camera. The fish were everywhere, and they were hungry! Justin and I proceeded to go through a lot of waxies, catching many crappies and a couple small bluegills. Unfortunately, the better fish didn’t turn on until about 2:30. We caught fish one after another all morning, but most crappies were running between 5-8″ long. After some cold scouting around with no shanty, we finally found the right area to put the shanty and started all over again. The crappies were still running small, but I finally got something on that felt like it would break my line at any moment. It turned out to be a nice perch, and gave a heck of a fight on my UL frabill panfish popper After that, Justin managed a nice perch, and I caught a few nice keeper crappies. It was a fun outting, despite all the obvious physical difficulty. Make sure to bring plenty of propane with you, we went through 2-1/4 tanks of propane over the course of a 6 hour period
some crappies on the camera
A keeper.
another nice keeper- sweedish pimple. We were talking about ish monro at the time of this catch and when I caught it, I wouldn’t stop yelling “come and getchya somma dat! Come and getchya somma dat!”
Perch!
Here is my perch (sorry for the bad quality cell phones…)
Good Luck on the ice!
Cade Laufenberg