Panfish on the flats/bug hatch?

I fish panfish on our lake in a 20 foot deep basin during the winter, and went out prospecting to try and find sunnies up shallow in the weeds. I found green weeds everywhere I went, but never saw a fish on the camera in 50 or 60 holes drilled along shore over a quarter mile stretch. Aren’t they supposed to be up shallow during early ice? What would draw sunnies this early out to a bowl basin? Is there a bug hatch that goes on all winter? I’m confused, would love to get some insight!

Some lakes they setup in the basin or on the dropoff between weeds and basin open water fall already. Just have to figure out where they are at.

A flat with some depth and vegetation is usually way better than a straight shallow weed line, if you can find harder bottom sand, gravel in the basin could a bonus.

Sometimes its just where they go to school.

crinkle cut wrote:

Aren’t they supposed to be up shallow during early ice? What would draw sunnies this early out to a bowl basin?

Supposed to be? They’re fish and do what they do when they think they need to do it. “Supposed to be” is a “human” assumption. Early in the fall they may be relating to shallow weeds but I’d bet that if you fished those weeds late in the fall when water temps are falling fairly fast you’d find the fishing tough after the water gets to about 42 degrees. I’ve always let the water get quite cold and then hit the deepest portion of the lake with the boat and found fish to be crazy thick. The panfish will be the first fish in the bowl as the water temps drop. After about 40 degrees, the fish drop deeper as fast as the water temps. When this transition begins you may find some stragglers along the weeds but they’ll be quick to follow the others, and if you stay on top of what the water temps are doing [by fishing and watching water temps closely] you can see this transition as it occurs.

The deep basin offers comfort for the panfish during the ice-up time when the barometer can be all over the place on a daily basis. The warmest water will be found there. The forage they will live on exists there and is reactive to the lower light levels found in the deep basin.

Some interesting observations I’ve made over 60 years of panfishing….

* Your larger sunfish will be found closer to the bottom and size matters to them. The fish “layer” based on size with the smallest sunfish being pushed up to the top of the pile. The larger fish occupy that water because its closest to the food sources thus “first to the table”, less competition for the food, and because the smaller fish pushed higher act as prey for larger fish before they can get to the larger fish. If the weather stays stable for a string of days you may see the pack of fish break apart to some degree but as soon as another weather shift comes along they’ll be right back to the winter normal.

* Well structured lakes and lakes with current can be vastly different from the true basin lake. Lakes with lots of geological structure can have a myriad of ” basins” that panfish can use and be found in so using maps can be in line to successful fishing.

* If you have crappies in the lake, they too will wallow during and immediately after a sever cold front but will liven up fairly fast as they need to eat. Smaller crappies will get pushed down into the small sunfish and will feed like the sunfish do while you’ll find the better crappies higher up. Large crappies will feed on the small sunfish as they get displaced from the deepest water and lose the protection from numbers. Larger crappies will also visit the middle and upper portions of the water column to feed, which makes it necessary to watch the middle of the water column for blips or marks that come into view then disappear in a couple seconds. If you’re seeing these random blips high up, bring a jig or minnow up slightly higher than the mark’s depth and fish it…you may get your eyes opened.

*Some lakes are just flat out low light lakes in the winter. Being there an hour before dark and fishing until 9 might be better fishing for you. That last half hour of light on such lakes can be crazy as worms and bugs emerge from the mud on the bottom but you have to be there.

The most important thing here is to remember that fish are fish and don’t always show up or act as people think they should. So “supposed to be” is more of a people problem than you might think.

Absolutely awesome post Tom! That helped me understand basins quite a bit better. Thanks for sharing.

Great post Tom-those low light lakes can be a bummer, you spend hours prepping and driving, hauling, and you get a 20 min. window, or less!

tim hurley wrote:

Great post Tom-those low light lakes can be a bummer, you spend hours prepping and driving, hauling, and you get a 20 min. window, or less!

But that bite can be worth the small amount of time you get… I love catching crappies because they chase, generally way more than gills or perch although to a certain extent they will on some days too. I rarely fish into the hole, even though I know that can be great during the day, but tend to fish the sides of structure next to the hole in an effort to reduce the issue of barotrauma… Its a fish here or there, then game on for that 20 to 45 minutes before the chironomids take over the bottom of the lake… I don’t even try to fight them, even though I know they are there…

Mark

mbenson brings up a good point on the crappies chasing a bait. I may be fishing over a deep hole, but I seldom fish near the bottom. I usually start about 6-8 feet off the bottom and work my way up to just under the ice. When I find my starting point I mark my line with a magic marker at the rod’s tip. I jig for maybe two minutes at that depth then take up two handle cranks and work that level jigging upwards no more than four feet. Then I repeat. More often than not my best crappies will come from mid-column water and are not even marked on electronics until a second before the hit. These mid-column fish are there to eat and will rise up 10 or more feet to nail a bait. A small fish is the exception.

I mentioned before how the sunfish tend to layer according to size, pushing the smallest fish to the top of the pile. Crappies will actively feed on these little guys that wander above the rest, maybe chasing some tid-bit of food. I’ll keep 5 or 6 nice crappies for a meal and more that a few times I have found several small, less than and inch, sunfish in the water in the bucket that crappies have puked out and have found the same size sunnies in the gut of crappies while cleaning. Immediate post-cold front periods are when I notice the sunnies as being dinner for the crappies so I think the crappies are seeking the tiny sunnies as food right off the top of pile of congregated sunfish tight to the bottom.

Tom, thank you for the insight! When I’m referring to “supposed to be” with sunfish, I’m mostly talking about shows, articles etc. where the formula is laid out – “find green weeds, find fish!” I’m sure it’s true in lots of lakes, I was just really surprised that I couldn’t find a single straggler in the green weeds during first ice. My experience with crappies has been sort of so so on early ice in the basins, then it gets great toward Jan 1. It made me wonder if there was something bigger at play, like if your lake has x type of bug, fish will be magnetically attracted to it over all else. I’ve been doing pretty well lately, actually catching sunnies until 9:30 on Monday while watching my beloved Vikings lay an egg against the Packers….good thing the fish were biting!

The deeper you go in a lake, the warmer it is.

Or the fish could be chasing some critter that’s living deeper at the moment.

Much of my best Gill fishing comes in the 10-15’ range. I’ve caught them as shallow as 4’ up against the pencil reeds and as deep as 65’, running with suspended crappies.

A good example of fish not being where they’re ‘supposed’ to be is going on right now on Manthey’s Bay of Osakis. Big roaming schools of mixed gills and crappies are running right on the bottom of the deep basin in 22-25’ rather than on the 12-18’ breaks/edges where they are traditionally. I imagine some little bug or worm is thick out there.

I think most anglers would do well if they accepted the ideology that there are no absolutes when it comes to figuring out fish behavior. One of the handiest tool one can utilize to his benefit is a fishing log book. Record everything relevant: date, time started and finished, wind direction and speed, barometer, temp, water temp, atmospheric conditions, water clarity/color, bait used, lure color, depth he fish were caught. You name it, if you feel its a relevant, record it. In time one can go back and read the recorded info and begin to see some common things that can become a norm for locating the fish, but a person still has to remember that fish write their own rules so nothing is set in stone.

Fishing shows can be terribly deceptive in terms of how long they actually fished to get enough shots to make a clip a half hour long. Pay attention to the clothing and one cane often see three or four different jackets/shirts, caps, hoodies in one half hour show. They aren’t changing to look nice, they’re more likely filming for three or four days to get the snippets needed to make the show. Lots of things can change in the couple days the filming is done. I enjoy watching some fishing shows but don’t put a lot of stock in their hitting a hot bite for 1/2 hour.

This is truly awesome insight by Tom. I wish he’d show his face(figuratively, of course) around here again. Although I don’t blame him and totally understand why he may not want to… Sometimes it’s tough for me to figure out where walleyes are during mid-winter on certain lakes. Basin/deep structure or shallow flats/weeds? Somewhere in the middle? One thing I know is that I’ve often times found fewer eyes, but of bigger size, up shallow and relating to weed edges, and then found numbers of smaller, “eater” sized eyes in deep water right next to those same areas. I know this was originally a panfish question but I find the correlation to walleyes to be significant and super interesting.

I think it may be that fish of certain size-ranges tend to group together more often than not, and smaller food like insect larvae and small pelagic minnow species are more fitted to smaller fish, whereas those big girls need larger food, like panfish, which are often tucked into the weeds during low light. But then what about the schools of panfish out in deep basins? Do the big walleyes just ignore those? Or are they nomadic and following those crappie schools? Maybe it makes more sense for them to target the panfish in the weeds because they don’t have to expend as much energy chasing their prey and can just rely more on ambush… These are the thoughts I dwell on often and to be honest I love every second of it!

I’m really curious as to what James’ thoughts are on the matter @jamesholst

Funny I never read Tom’s post on this, but my experience has been exactly the same as he mentioned. I have caught many good crappies in the upper part of the column while others are releasing little ones or sunfish from deeper in the column.

That’s interesting John. I always hear that mentioned by people- that they usually find the bigger crappies above the “main” school. I almost always will pull up to the highest up fish when ice fishing crappies and check them out and have rarely had one be all that much bigger than the rest. I seem to find the big ones mixed throughout, shallow to deep and everywhere in between… That’s been my experience at least.

What’s the consensus, do most of you notice the trend of bigger crappies being higher up above the majority of the others?

Biggest ones seem to be the most aggresive, 1st one to my lure is often the biggest.

tim hurley wrote:

Biggest ones seem to be the most aggresive, 1st one to my lure is often the biggest.

I guess I could see that just as much as I could see the little ones getting to it faster.

Sometimes up higher for the big ones. However, they almost always seem to the the ones that will rise very quickly and chase almost to the hole.

Fished a north metro lake today…all the fish were relating to the bottom. You’d get one shot at the big ones…they would rocket off the bottom and swipe at the bait. If you missed they would be straight back to the bottom and not come back again. Didn’t mark a single fish more than a foot off the bottom.

I think cold front conditions impact where they are in the water column. On this lake some were in weeds and some in the basin. Regardless, all were tight to bottom.

Pretty tight to the bottom where I was too-rare that I set up a shack but when I do I like some solid marks up a bit first, settled for a good pod of bluegills (small) hoping that would turn into a crappie bite after dark-is that a good strategy over a basin?

Most times when I set up at night, I try to be on the side of a basin with weeds near by. Like 8-12ft with a 20-30ft basin. Still set up my lines to be in the upper half of the column.

I usually have my bobber line with minnow set high in the water column (8-12 feet) over the basin (25-35 fow). Then my jig line I’ll move up and down to find the actively biting fish. Once it gets dark it gives me a better idea if they want minnows or waxies too. Often the jig line is better until dark, and then the shallower line with minnows works better after dark.

Great tips, thanks. They do seem to want the meaty minnow after dark. Would also make sense to park by the weed.

tim hurley wrote:

Great tips, thanks. They do seem to want the meaty minnow after dark. Would also make sense to park by the weed.

Idk, I’ll give you the fact that they generally do seem to switch to minnow preference at night, but every time the bite slows down I’ll switch back to larvae and/or plastics and pick up a few. Then back to minnows.

Why its great to have 2 lines down.