I posted this elsewhere, but wanted to share with IDA bro’s too… 
Gianni and I tried the Palo backwaters (mud lake) last night from about 9-11:30pm, by the “community tree” just south of the Blair’s Ferry bridge . The ice was peppered with holes, but all in all seemed pretty stable, with the upper layer of slush freezing. There was still a good 10” of ice out there-but don’t take my word for it, remember, no ice is safe ice.
I’m pretty sure we found the hundreds of crappies that were metioned in another report (on I/O), even though we had no camera, our vex was lit up at 13’-6’ with fish from time to time. Depth was about 13’ in the spot we chose near the tree. Pretty sure they weren’t shad as Gianni 
managed to catch about 3 of them, but they were all dinks that bit super light-biggest crappie was just under 7” and scrawny thin. We had a minnow on the deadstick that got nabbed, but we don’t know by what-probably a catfish or maybe a northern. Shawn was on the mark about those crappie. We threw just about everything at them, but could not get them to hit consistently. A tiny glow jig tipped with a wax worm caught the 3 dinks. I stuck with a larger jig (that has worked this year in helping cull the dinks to an extent-but you catch less fish, and less gut-hooked fish) and got skunked in part probably due to that decision, but I did have several light bites and got my bait stole a couple of times.
Lots of ppl have been fishing that spot, as evidenced by all the holes. There are definitely fish in there, just last night they weren’t real hungry. There were 2 other trucks parked along the road, but we didn’t run into those fellas, they must have been back in that quarry pond. Since it was late and we were marking tons of fish, we just kept at it by the tree.
Joe
