Pool 8- Last Ice Report

Today was my last outing of the season on the hard water. It was not a stellar outing, but I had fun and was happy just to find enough ice to stand on. Most locations were vacant of people, but The location that we had planned for the GTG today had several people out. Camp 22 off of fisherman’s road has about 15 feet of water before the ice. I cannot jump that far..especially with Bucket and flasher in hand Luckily, a group of guys was fishing on the ice and they brought a small jon boat with them to make it to the ice.
We got on the ice and found 12+” of ice and an abundance of cigar 6″ or less perch in the area. They were biting well but we wanted bigger fish. We relocated to a different part of the bay, where 2 other guys were fishing. They made it out using chest waders and caught a nice batch of good bluegills and 1 16-1/2″ bass earlier in the morning. The panfish bite in this area was ok, but still tough. The problem was not a lack of fish. I could mark anywhere from 5-8 different fish at any given time in any given hole for the most part. They were somewhat agressive too. The problem was, they were biting so incredibly light that getting the hook in the fish was a real challenge, and limited me from catching more than a couple dozen fish for the entire day. My dad caught several also, but overall we probably only had around 8 keeper fish. It was real tough. Similar to the bite shown on IDO’s Trophy Panfish Principles, I think leaving the aqua vu at home today was a poor decision. The water clarity in the front of the bay was poor, but in the back visibility was a couple feet and would have been reasonable for viewing the fish as the sucked in our baits right before spitting them back out I did not go out of the 06-07 ice season with a bang, but I can definitely look forward to the coming open water season, and I hope to be chasing bass again by as soon as next weekend.

Stay on top
Cade

Here is a nice ~11″ crappie that I managed to ice among several keeper bluegills and 1 decent perch.

When coming home up 35N there looked to be about 20-25 people fishing the bay at the end of Fisherman’s Road. It was a sad day for me as well because all ice equpment was put into the rafters of the garage for another year.

Nice report Cade. Up here we are still driving out, average ice is 25″ as of today. Warm up on the way though, they are talking 44 on wed-fri. Hopefully that makes the bite pick up.

Thanks Guys!

Yes Belgian, we took a drive up to the end on our way out. We should have gone up there before we started! The ice looked better and it wasn’t broken up at all on shore surprisingly. I am not sure how they were doing but there were quite a few dudes out. The whole lake is still frozen from what I could see, so its going to be a while before ice out up there