Sherman Reservoir Report 2-17-07 and 2-18-07

With the unbelievable ice conditions in Nebraska this year and the steady walleye bite at Sherman, I headed back again this weekend. I was joined by my friend Layne this weekend and my friend Adam was able to join us for the Saturday evening bite. The weather was beatiful and the walleye bite continued to be good.

We arrived a the lake late Saturday afternoon and quickly set up on a channel break with a small nearby flat. We drilled holes in depths from 14 to 26 feet of water. For the first hour or so we only marked 1 fish. I was beginning to wonder if the fish were even going to show up on this spot any more. Well it didn’t take much longer for the action to begin. We started off with some short walleye coming on tip-ups, as they have always seemed to be the first to show up in the evening in this spot. The tip-up action continued for 35 minutes or so with around 10 walleye coming in. One of them was just 18 and made a tasty meal. Then around 6:30 or so, the fun began on jigging rods. Adam had only been ice fishing a couple of times before and had never caught a walleye through the ice. He was very anxious to catch an eye and his first one was a good one. He was using a Buckshot Rattle Spoon tipped with a full minnow when he landed the nice 20 and 1/2 incher in the second picture. He had the "honey hole" for the evening pulling 3 more 17-18 inch fish out of that hole. He also caught a nice 13 1/4 inch crappie and nice channel cat. Way to go Adam!! We left Saturday around 9:30 when the action finaly quit after catching over 25 walleyes.

Sunday morning Layne and I hit the ice early hoping the bite at sun up would be as good as the bite the evening before. Well, it wasn’t looking good. After a couple of hours with just a couple of short walleye and marking very few fish I decided to check out an area just down the lake a few hundred yards. While I was trying to get something going I hear Layne yell that he just caught one. I headed back over to see him with the awesome 24 incher that was in the first picture above. This fish just hammered his Swedish Pimple he said. He did a great job landing it on his own and it made a dull day, GREAT! We didn’t get any more fish for a while after that so we headed down the lake to meet up with some friends that were on a good crappie spot.

The crappie were biting pretty good as we pulled up but by the time we got our lines in the water it slowed down quite a bit. We stayed there until 5:00 or so and only caught a couple of nice crappies and I was lucky enough to get a nice 20 inch walleye on my St.Croix sping bobber rod with a #8 Mini Mert tipped with a tiny minnow. What a drag burner that was with 2 lb mono! We finished off the evening back at our walleye spot hoping the bite would be as good as it was the night before. We caught quite a few more short walleye but none over 18 inches.

With temps getting close to 60 this week I don’t think we have much ice fishing time left here in Nebraska but, this has by far been my best year ever for ice fishing in Nebraska. I have been ice fishing for 8 years and this was the thickest ice we’ve had since I started. I hope I can make a couple more trips in the next week or two if our ice can hang in there that long.