Hey most of the lakes I’m fishing up here have every little pressure and no maps. I’ve been trying to figure out and mark high percentage areas and have pike nailed down but locating structure through the ice is painfully slow going any advice? Lake contains walleye, whitfish and pike
Plan on marking more this summer but was unable 5o fish the lake pre freeze
Drill.
Google maps. Satalite view. Zoom.
It definitely gives you something to go off of and if conditions are good enough in the image, it can sometimes tell you a lot (especially if the water is more clear than stained). Weed lines, underwater structure, contours, deeper holes, all depends on the quality of the image and the water though.
Much better than going at it blind and it should at least give you a starting point. it should help you exclude some areas right off the bat too.
How large of lakes? 30-60 acres? 200 acres??
Understanding shorelines, grade, soil type, trees, and so on can help determine what type of structure you have in an area before even drilling a hole. The few 50 to 80 acres lakes I like that have no maps have been mapped by myself. Dropped m boat or my row boat in and scanned with the 1197. when I found pronounced transitions from mud to hard, I followed that line. Often came up on rock piles, rocky ridges, boulders….structure that no one ever fishes in these lakes
There are a lot of threads out here on this issue, but one thing you can do to narrow things down is look at the shoreline structure. Higher banks = quicker dropoff to deeper hole (not always, but a good place to start). Slow transitioning weedy shoreline = mud flats with less pronounced transitions (as a general rule at least). Also, try calling your county to see if you can get survey data. In northern MN at least, a lot of these little lakes were roughly mapped out during County land surveys back in the 70’s and 80’s. Other than that, the only thing to do is honeycomb the areas you think you want to fish and get a mental map of the structure.
This spring/summer make a map of it with a humminbird.
For now… Drill holes.
A tip for first ice… Bring a jug of water. Pour a small amount of water on the ice and set your duecer in the water. If the ice is clear and thin enough you will be able to see bottom… And at times fish too.
I used to love those conditions… Could find fish without drilling a hole. Typically this works with 8″ or less ice.
Hey thanks for the advice some new ideas here for me I’m way north(Northwest Territories) definitely no survey data for these lakes. The lake isnt huge maybe 2-3 miles long by .5 to 1 wide lots of creeks and rivers but been trying shore line structure which has helped but transitions from mud to rock or deep water structure has been slow going. Google earth has had limited success not high enough quality on several lakes to spot much. Drilling and summer mapping it is! Thanks a ton everyone!
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