Lake Macbride

Kolby Kelster of Iowa Walleye Magazine, called me yesterday and wanted to fish for some walleyes on Lake Macbride. I said, we can try, but I will bet my life, we won’t catch one. We both had our power augers going all day, and no walleyes to show for it. I have never done exceptionally well on macbride for walleyes. They are just fed to well, and too skittish.

We each caught a nice channel cat- mine came on a go-devil tipped with a minnow head- and Kolby’s came on a Kastmaster silver spoon with a minnow head. I did get bit off once, either buy a walleye or musky.

Kolby stayed at it all day, but I found a spot that had some of the “not stunted” Macbride crappies, and had to take a break from not catching walleyes.

I was set up in 12 FOW over some brush. I was using a tiny orange tungsten jig, with a twin tail ice plastic for the crappies. These crappies were very picky as well. I could only get them to bite, by getting them to chase to eight feet, and the hold. If I didn’t get them up to eight feet, they wouldn’t bite. Even if they would follow after eight feet, they wouldn’t bite…

..the ice is still in fairly good shape- but watch out for the areas of run off- and the springs.

It was great to meet you Kolby..and I had a blast fishing with you!! Anytime I have a good walleye bite going on Macbride, I will let you know!!

Briank fish…

Last one…Dinner..

You found those beauties in McBride? Wow wish I had the magic touch…. Nice Fish guys….

That’s what it’s all about,not catching what you went after and still having a good time. Glad to see you get into a few slabs Luke Nice report!

Nice fish Luke! A couple of us have tomorrow off, we’ll probably burn some fuel heading somewhere north, but may need to re-visit those plans. Your post is in line with several other reports about some nice crappies being caught at the Mac. Some sorting is needed to get a decent creel; if you’re keeping, but as we can see, they are definately in there. Great report!

Joe

I was also out on Macbride yesterday. I was using minnows and I noticed several fish on the vex that would follow for about 5 ft but I couldn’t get any to hit. Anyway we were out from 7-9, didn’t catch any fish but there was still plenty of Ice everywhere we went…even found about 16″ still in one spot.

Bob- with those finicky fish in Mabride (the bigger ones anyways are finicky) I only use plastic…like lindy’s techna glo tails. Things like that work really well for me. I had minnows, and waxworms. They wouldn’t touch minnows…and I got a few fish on the waxworms. The thing is with Macbride- if you are using waxworms, and continually catching the dinks, you aren’t fishing half the time because you are always re-baiting. So I just stick to plastics…

Joe- I will be on macbride in the morning- north arm. Let me know if you are coming to macbride!!

Those are some honkers Luke, I can catch those in the spring but have yet to hit a pile like that this winter. I’ll be stocking up on the tiny finesse plastics as that has been the repeated modus operandi for spankin the slabs mentioned on the boards. As long as its not open skate on the roads tommorrow I’ll be plying the frozen H2O somewhere close to home.

Joe, how did you and Gianni do up north today?

Hey guys…woke up late..or is that early? (collapsed with my 2 year old son and dozed off early in the evening last night after supper-it was that sore, tired feeling you can only get from being out on the ice all day! )

We opted to head North-I’ll throw a post up here shortly, but we didn’t head that far north-with the ice storm in the forecast. I’ll let you guys know next time I head to the Mac-maybe late Sunday once this storm calms down. Look for a blue fishtrap, with a small broom outside. (I use the broom to “sweep” the slush from my hole drilling.) Knock on the flap for a sample of deer salami from the Solon locker (Ruzicka’s)or homemade chocolate chip cookies (Rugby knows!) if you see me out there!

Speaking of which, the weather ppl are talking about possible blizzard warnings later tommorrow/weekend, depending on the storm track, be careful out there or wait it out!

Joe

Judging from the view from my living room window, the ice didn’t cover the roads and sidewalks too much. Maybe it stayed just warm enough that the 900mph winds kept things dry.

Just the same, I think I’ll wait for the hurricane to end before I make any plans to hit the ice.

Hey Gianni come on up to NE Iowa, we’re supposed to get 13 to 20 inches of snow with wind gusts of 50 mph!!

Ed

Well, I spoke too soon on Saturday morning.

The hurricane winds ripped about two dozen shingles off my roof, and just when I’m resigning myself to doing nothing about it until the storm is over, the entire east-facing front of my house iced over and the power went down.

Still no juice for Gianni, going on two days. If it’s not on today I’ll probably run the generator from work down and plug in the garage freezer for a couple of hours. Until then, I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

Gianni,

Ouch! My power in Coralville was only down for about eighteen hours. My biggest loss was a head of lettuce.

I have been chomping at the bit to get out and hit some of the out-of-the-way cover and structure on Macbride that I have found and GPS’d in on open water. I am not sure my GPS coordinates are exactly on the spots in question, and I wanted to have a power auger with me when I went looking for them, because I might have to drill a few extra holes to find those sweet spots.

For the last month, though, I endured a nightmarish situation with my new gas-powered auger (see the Outdoor Gear forum for more details.) That massive headache has been resolved, so I plan on getting out on Macbride and hitting some non-community structure.

Well, the out of the way places are the place to be. I went full on derelict this afternoon after nursing 100 servers back to health from the power outage all morning. Found an area adjacent(I think) to brush. There was none visible in the 3 holes that I drilled but after I cleared some ice from the first one and stuck the vex down it was lit with fish from 15 FOW to 10 FOW so I dropped a jig and waxie down to see what was up, figuring that it was a bunch of dink Mac BG’s. But whoah, not the case, finally the mongo crappie motherload. And they were hungry. Didn’t matter what I threw at them, plastic, waxies and minnows all got bit. The ice is still well over 12 inches with 1.5 of skim and .5 of water on top. Get out there while the getting’s good. All fish were released so there are at least 30 mongo crappie swimming around. Thanks for the tips Luke and TPYI.