Cold Weather Crappies on Ice

My buddy Kevin Key and I set a new personal record for the coldest weather we’ve ever gone fishing in. We set off across a snow covered trail, shanty and gear in tow, at 6:30am this past Sunday morning in -14 degree weather. (not counting wind chill) Now I know guys up in International Falls fish in weather like that on a regular basis but around this part of the country, it’s not quite as common.
What got us out of bed that early to brave the coldest weather of the year so far? Big, hungry crappies in less than 10′ of water that’s what!
I was out on this same body of water last Monday afternoon (Martin Luther King Holiday) and had started working out a pattern for big crappies. The last hour of daylight saw a 15 minute run of big crappies that left me wanting more and because I had to work the rest of the week, Saturday could not come soon enough.

Saturday morning I was on the same body of water at 6:00am, hunkered down in my shanty hoping to put the hurt on some big crappies. I thought for sure it would be good right from the get go but that was not the case. The best bite actually occurred between 7:30 – 9:00am. Which gave me some more time to work out the best baits.
The top two producing baits by mornings end were a red diamond jig tipped with a red plastic wedgee & a dark red Mini Mert tipped with a 1″ gulp minnow.
Anything tipped with a waxworm or spike caught only little fish or nothing at all.

With the bite completely dead by 10:00am, I headed home and gave my ice fishing buddy Kevin Key a call to see if he wanted to get in on some of this action during the afternoon. It took him about 2 seconds to commit and he volunteered to bring minnows as well.
We arrived around 2:00pm and proceeded to drill about 30 holes. The shanty was setup as a base (Kevin’s base) while I proceeded to fish all the other good looking holes. After hole hopping for an hour, it was pretty obvious where we needed to set up shop for the evening run. A few extra holes were drilled, the shanty was moved and we settled in for the late afternoon run.
As it turned out, crappie minnows did catch some big fish but no more than the two hot rigs I already mentioned.

Kevin had a bit of a learning curve to go thru before he was actually able to put a big slab on the ice. Trying to pull a 12-13″ crappie up thru the hole before they actually had their head turned into the bottom of the hole just wasn’t going to work and he found this out the hard way. Not reaching down and grabbing these fish with your hand once you had them up in the hole was also a mistake, as Kevin also learned. (I wasn’t any better last Monday evening, losing several at the hole before figuring it out) Not removing the transducer from the hole when you hooked up with a good one was also a big mistake as we both learned. All those mistakes added up as we lost several really good fish at the hole. But the fun factor was still way high and neither one of us was willing to leave until the bite died down shortly after night fall. The walk back to the truck was quite cold but it didn’t stop us from making plans to do it again first thing in the morning.
The clouds cleared out over night and the temps took a dive and as we found out the following morning, so did our fish. Kevin did stick that big 14-1/4″ crappie on Sunday morning and I caught a nice 10″ perch but aside from those two fish, the rest were just average at best.
For the two of us though, it was nice to finally hit the hot bite right on the head since we both had been in a bit of a rut. For once, we were not the ones who were a day late and a dollar short!