Location, location, location…

Wow, what a day! Mike and I were on the ice for 10 1/2 hours today and we absolutely had a field day. It was warm with dense fog and light sprinkles all morning. With the snow melt, the river had risen close to 2 feet so I expected to have issues getting on the ice and had brought my waders just in case. That wasn’t necessary, the edges of the cove were fine. The ice was a solid 6″ but there was quite a bit of standing water in places. The main goal was to finally ice a pike on the cove and to keep us uccupied between flags, we were going to jig a near by log crib that I had found. Again, the tip ups were dead slow. We checked them often as it was impossible to keep an eye on them in the thick fog. As it turns out, Mike got the only fish of the day on a tip up. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a pike… It turned out to be a huge pickerel.

With the day that we had jigging, I couldn’t have cared less about the tip ups. We reopened my old holes on the crib and were instantly in to fish. For the entire day we fished an area no bigger than 15 x 15. At first we caught a lot of crappie but then as it got lighter out, it changed to more perch than crappie. The fish just kept coming. I was amazed at the overall size of the fish. The majority of our perch were over 11″, with some close to 14″. The crappie were even more impressive. We had many over 12″. Mike jigged up a monster 15″ fish!

We caught on Slick Jigs, Frostees, Rattl’n Flyers and Darters. The Darters accounted for most of the bigger, more aggressive fish. On the Humminbird flasher, you could watch the fish fly in up off of the bottom towards the jig. The bigger fish would hit it right away. The smaller ones would slowly fade back to the bottom. Thats when we grabbed a second rod with a smaller lure tipped with just a spike. Almost every time, the fish would come right back and hit the more subtle presentation.

We kept hammering away at them. We decided to keep a mess of the larger ones for a couple of meals. We ended up taking just over 40 fish home for dinner. The electric fillet knife made quick work of them… I wish every time out was that productive!

Here is a video of some of the action from today: