Northern MN – Late Ice Panfish Report

I named this a late-ice panfish report almost tongue-in-cheek given a few realities from our trip. First, the Leech lake area is far from “late-ice” with as much as 2 feet of snow on top of up to 18″es of slush above the ice. We actually had to blast through a drift or two to get down some of the gravel roads we were fishing around. Secondly, the panfish really only bit well for a single afternoon, while predator fish that were feeding on them stole the show. All in all, there was some serious drag-singing going on while we did our best to fish around the predators to catch gills.

After talking to James and Tony Roach last week about the ice-conditions they had been facing in that neck of the woods, I was downright scared. Stories of pushing slush with your bumper on plowed roads makes for less-than-exciting pre-trip jitters. We’d need a snowmobile to have any hope out there, and Chris’s stories of sleds buried in slush sound like time-sinks as well. We lucked out with some good morning low temps which kept the snow stable enough until later afternoon to keep us afloat. Smaller lakes were most definitely better, and we actually visited a couple of tiny lakes that we’d filmed on the past few years just to stay away from the big-lake slush pockets that can paralyze you. We say this from experience after hitting one which took the better part of an hour to dig out from….and we considered that relatively unscathed! The lesson here is to check conditions on the ground with whomever you can just before you head up. Some lakes, especially larger ones may be un-fishable in portions due simply to slush/snow conditions.

Late-ice and weedbeds always go together well for me when it comes to panfish. A bluegill show from a few years ago really reminded me of this bite, as we had some great gills around a relatively small standing weedbed in 10-12 FOW. The primary difference from that trip and this one was small, but important, and I felt like it really affected our bite. In the show, we fished a relatively dense weedbed, where the gills could hover in and out of, mostly safe from cruising predators. This weekend, the weeds were sparse, and while they held gills and some perch, the panfish didn’t have a prayer. Big pike and huge bass really prevented us from getting anything going in the main lake we fished. All panfish we saw on the underwater camera were buried at the base of the sparser weeds we found, and there weren’t many of them. We searched off of the beds a bit, looking for more traditional mid-winter spots, and ended up finding fish in 16-22FOW, but the big ones were elusive. A 9 3/4″ pumpkinseed was a rare, but welcome sight, and made for the largest panfish we found.

All of the better predators in this small lake must’ve been ready and waiting here for the panfish to move shallow, as our average size on the dozen or so bass we caught was around 19″. The largest was 21″es, and we had another 20.5″ fish that was much thicker and heavier than any of the others. The pike never got a tape put to it, but there were also some smaller ones on the prowl. All of which were fun to catch, but with panfish being the only open-season, we were chased off the weedbeds to fish for some smaller mid-winter pattern gills. My guess is that in the next two weeks those deeper fish will be pushing shallow, and that pattern will come into play, especially with the warming trend we’re seeing. In a normal year, we would’ve hit the last of the late-ice bite squarely, but there’s still some great fishing to come. Don’t hang it up yet folks, the best is yet to happen!

Joel