West Metro Panfish Report

Well after watching IDO episode #2, I was geared up to chase some bluegills and crappies in the western Twin Cities metro area! Taking in what I learned from the video for searching for panfish, I thought of a perfect smaller lake that should be ideal! This lake has the structure to be a perfect to hold many panfish, and not much pressure to hold bigger fish as well! Well as you can see in this first photo Ron was able to find a dandy sunfish holding near a weed edge adjacent to deeper water! Nice fish Ron!

The key to finding and catching these fish was to drill lots of holes and hole hop often. Once you put the flasher down the hole and didn’t see any fish, that hole was not worth fishing, move onto a hole that has fish already present! This was key cause of the dirty stained water that we were fishing. In clear lakes or less stained water you can locate structure or fish nearby with the camera and try to coax these fish into biting. I tried using the camera to look for fish, but I soon found out that wasn’t going to happen! That is why drilling lots of holes and moving from hole to hole until you seen fish was important!

The bait of choice was waxies, along with either a tear drop vertical style lure like pictured on Ron’s fish or the old reliable Mini Mert by BFT! These fish were a little sluggish in the early morning and became more aggresssive as the day wore on! There was some sorting through these fish to ensure yourself a decent meal! As you can see in this photo some of the smaller fish are litterally jumping out of the holes!!!

For 3 guys we were able to sort through some fish and keep about 10/guy to have a nice meal of tasty panfish! If your looking for a meal of tasty panfish or simply looking to take your family out fishing, I would look to many of the lakes within the Twin Cities metro area for some good panfish action from now until ice out!

Good luck and have a safe rest of the ice season!!

Ice conditions for the lake was about 15" of ice with a few inches of snow cover! Lake conditions will vary from lake to lake make sure to check your local bait shops or resorts prior to accessing the lakes with vechicles. We parked on the ice and that is about as far as I wanted to go!!!!