This would be a good topic to cover in a “webisode”, how many holes do you drill to cover a piece of structure to stay on fish.
I can answer this fairly easily. We punch as many as is needed but no more than is necessary to maximize the number of fish we’re able to put on the ice.
Scenario #1 – If we’re on a bite where we’re sporadically picking up a fish here, a fish there, like was the case on Upper Red, we’re constantly taking turns with the auger expanding the search area and that’s how we end up swiss cheesing such large areas during the course of the day. When the fish are neutral and scattered very often success comes down to 25 or 50 new holes = 1 more fish on the ice. That’s basically the way it worked on Upper Red and it allowed us to really dial in where we wanted to be during prime time as well.
Scenario #2 – Other times when we’re able to drop on a “spot on the spot” where we have a large number of fish in a small area… there’s no need for more holes in those cases. As long as we feel like we’re on the best bite the area can produce we’re not going to waste time punching new holes.
Scenario #1 is far more common than Scenario #2. Long story short, if someone in our group hasn’t iced a fish in 5 – 10 minutes and we’ve checked all available holes someone is going to jump on the auger and get to work. When someone picks up the auger to punch a string we’re talking 50 – 75 holes, minimum, which is a sufficient number of holes to keep two anglers busy checking holes and fishing.
If we’re fishing as a group with more than two anglers to check holes we’ll take turns punching larger numbers of holes while the other anglers fish them… the guy running the auger will go for 20 minutes or more before handing off the auger. When you’re running a Lazer Mag… you can punch a lot of holes in 20 minutes!
If the fish are scattered and we’re trying to track them down we won’t fish holes where we don’t mark fish. We’ll just dunk transducers to see if there’s a fish in the hole. If not, we’re on to the next hole. In this type of scenario a guy that’s good with the auger and a couple anglers checking holes can hole hop through a huge area. This is the type of system we use that is responsible for finding almost all of our best bites.
How many holes get punched in a day? The only time I’ve ever really counted is recently when I started to use the Lithium Lazer and wanted to accurately track the capabilities of the battery powered auger. Based on those totals and how long a battery would last and how many holes we were punching I’ll throw out that in a typically day on the ice we punch hundreds, not dozens.
