Went out of Sat afternoon for the first time this ice season. I got out about 1:00PM, fished out at a small lake just east of Newton, the Jacob Krumm Preserve, a 25 acre lake. When I got out there there were quite a few other fisherman out there trying there luck. I had spend quite a bit of time out there during open water season so I decided to stay away from the group of folks and fish in an area that I had marked fish. It doesn’t have any real structure other than, best way to describe it is a bowl.. but there were always fish there. So I grabbed my vex and dropped a splash of water on the ice, turned on the vex and started marking some fish through the ice. I drilled a hole with the good ole hand auger…UGH!…still marking some fish I lowered down a size 6 glow Ratso. I could see my bait going down and up come a suspended fish…crappie!!.. fish on.. nice sized one.. then I dropped it down again and bam.. another fish.. big gill..first two fish of the season..
Caught quite a few fish that day.. most were suspended in about 10-12 FOW, with some coming up off the bottom at about 17 FOW. I wanted to give you all some feed back on the new Berkly Gulp Alive baits they’ve made for ice fishing. I first tried a jig with a 1″ minnow and I managed to do pretty good with it. The first fish I caught with em was a nice crappie. I also ended up catching a small bass and a decent gill. The minnow performed great! What was really nice was to catch three different species on the same bait, speaks a lot for the versatility of this new Berkly Gulp Alive..
I also had picked up some minnow heads that Berkly also had just come out. I tipped a Swedish Pimple with one of the minnow heads, and dropped it down. It was blast to see the fish shoot off the bottom and come after that thing. I had a fish come up in my Vex, suspended in about 10 FOW, brought my bait up and jigged it. Felt the telltale thump and set the hook, up comes another nice crappie. So I managed to catch some really decent fish on both the 1″ minnow and the minnow head. Both were natural colors. I’ll give em both a great big thumbs up… All in all it was a good day. I was able to hook into about 20 or so fish. I didn’t have any wax worms but took along some trout rooms and used small junks of those. So between the three baits I did pretty good. The first two fish came on my new Genz 27″ Rod, which was also fun. Ahhhh…nothing like getting the kinks worked out on the ice!!.. Tight Lines All
Great report