Sunday, December 27, 2009

12-28 ice fishing

Ice fishing if finally here! Actually I already went on a two day ice fishing trip to Big Sandy and another lake 3 weeks ago. That's the good news. The bad news is that I thought I had fresh batteries for my camera but discovered at the worst possible time that my charger didn't work, so my batteries were dead and I had to get another charger. Well, now I got my fresh batteries and am ready to go!

Big Sandy and the other lake produced a few nice fish, Big Sandy I caught some slab crappies, although it was a finesse situation and had to really work for them. On lake x the fish were even more tight lipped, but managed some crappies and a few gills. Others in our party fared better than me with a 10" gill and 13.5" crappie.

Let's fast forward to yesterday. I went to a metro area lake teamed up with Mike Thompson, hoping to ice some nice panfish. The weather was in the 20's, the lake had snow with a layer of slush under it, winds were light...a very delightful day to be on the ice. We drilled quite a few holes and we could not find any fish. I started drilling closer to the shore before I started connecting with the crappies, bluegills not far behind. They were fairly aggressive and liked my offering of Gulp! Minnow Fry. In fact, I didn't catch anything else on any other offerings, the Minnow Fry killed 'em! I ended up taking home a limit of crappies and about 10 gills although I certainly caught more than that. There are some bruiser gills in that lake....I caught a couple around 9".


sweet crappie in the hole...



a decent fish...

and another...

caught this little bass too...



Biggest crappie of the day around 11"