Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Time to get out of town...

This year has been a real struggle to ice quality fish. Waconia has been slow, plus, one of my favorite little lakes close by my home has been taken over by dink perch! Other outings have been relatively fruitless. Yeah, sure, there are pathetic little fish I could take pics of and post, but why bother, really!

Fortunately I will have some relief from the ice-fishing blues, because friday I hit the road for 3-day trip to Grand Rapids. Andy will be driving seperately, will fish with me friday and half of saturday before he returns. I'll stick around through sunday.

What can I expect? That's a tough call. Weather is forcast to be seasonably warm, with daytime highs around the freezing mark. But as I understand there might be some good 'ol high pressure lurking, which will make the bite a bit unpredictable. Hopefully I'll be able to catch some quality bluegills and crappies, and if things stabilize, I could get onto a really good panfish bite. I look forward to trying my new Ice-Stopper fairy jigs in glow red and the Lindy Flying Rattler jigging spoon. Weather will definitely favor outside fishing adventure.

I'll have my camera ready to go, so look forward to pictures and my report upon my return.

Casey

Sunday, February 7, 2010

friday report

I had the day off work friday so I headed to a small metro area lake that supposedly had some big gills in it. It was snowing lightly and the temps were in the upper twenties, so it was pleasant fishing weather. I dragged my stuff out there and drilled a bunch of holes covering deep to shallow. I found active gills in every hole, and they were easy to catch, the only problem was the size. Small, potato chip sunnies no bigger than the hand.




Well, after a couple hours of that game I decided to head to Waconia to see if I could vindicate my last three outings there. I tried a couple different spots, fishing in the weeds, without anything to show for it. So I decided to head to the Pillsbury Reef area, an area I had struggled in this year but had caught some quality panfish there last year. I found an area with some deep weeds and sure enough found some active bluegills. They were on the bottom, mixed in with the weeds, but were eager to bite my offering of an orange Berkley Fish Fry. It was a bit slow at first, but as it got closer to dusk they became much more active. I kept a couple close to the nine inch mark.

After the gills shut down, I decided to switch gears and try for crappies. I put on a red Glow Demon tipped with a Gulp! waxie; I managed a couple crappies this way. They were slow, coming off the bottom slowly sliding up to my offering. Here's one at 10.5".



Monday, February 1, 2010

not much happening...

Since returning from Grand Rapids I have nothing noteworthy to report. Fishing has been very tough for me the last four or five outings, trying some new spots in the TC metro area, with only a few embarassingly small panfish.

Coming up: I am looking forward to a two day panfish trip to Ottertail county at the end of February, and then there is the late ice period in March when the bite should pick up. Between now and then I'll probably spend most of my time on local lakes trying to locate a decent bite.