Carpin’ the hard water 2-4-11

Targeting these scaly brutes under the ice has been a mission of mine for the last two ice seasons. The learning curve has been steep..mostly met with failures, lots of head scratching, frozen fingers, and equally frozen beers. It all started with an underwater camera revealing some golden beauties cruising around under the ice on one of my favorite local panfish ponds a few years back. I was out there promptly the next day chumming a circle of holes with corn and fishing in the middle hoping for some action. End result= FAIL! Next up was aimlessly dangling a crawler under the ice also resulting in failure. I tried different lakes that hold good numbers of fish, lots of different tactics, and just about everything else I could think of. Only to be met with failure time and time again. Last season only resulted in one almost catch that broke my line just under the hole. DOH!

Move forward to just last week- I was slaving away at work listening to Soucheray on AM1500 when I hear the word “carp” faintly coming from the radio in the back of the shop. I instantly walked over to turn it up just in time to catch The Lake Detective talking about research he was doing regarding commercial fishing for carp under the ice. He stated that this is the time of winter when they really start to school up and become more active. A dim lightbulb telling me to “RESUME THE MISSION” proceeded to go off in my (too dumb to catch a carp on the hardwater) brain. Not being one to argue with lightbulbs a buddy and I hit the water in short order with a new plan of attack.

A week earlier while Crappie fishing we noticed strange returns on our Marcums that lit them up like a Tesla experiment gone awry. These marks would only last for a few minutes at the most and were almost always suspended quite high in the water column, sometimes gone as quickly as they showed up haunting us like ghosts from the deep. A little further investigation on my pal Stinglers part and it was confirmed! We found a Carp highway, in this case a vein, and soon struck gold!

So far in our short run actually targeting Carp this year it’s been a hoot! A couple fish the other day, a couple whiffs under the hole, and some wicked drag peeling on light tackle. Luckily the area we’ve been fishing is also home to quite a few Crappies to keep you interested while waiting between schools of roaming carp. The area we’ve been targeting is steeper shoreline on large soft bottom flat near a channel in about 15 FOW. Bait of choice so far has been a gob of wax worms deadsticked 6-8 feet below the surface. I intend to investigate further with some veggies and grains this coming weekend to see if there’s something more preferable to their palate. Will post back with results.