Monday, December 20, 2010

Ice Fishing 12-18-2010

This was the first chance I'd had to ice-fish this season.  The ice has been 4"+ for a couple of weeks now, and was probably 7" or so at both ponds my buddy Jay and I fished this day.
We fished 2 city public ponds.  The first one we had never ice-fished before, and rarely fished during open water.  We drilled holes and soon each of us had fish.  It soon slowed down, and we tried drilling more holes to find fish, but never really did.  So, we gave up and headed to the next pond.  But before that, we both landed some Bluegills and Green Sunfish, and I added a couple Crappies and Largemouth Bass.




The 2nd pond we fished is one I fished frequently this summer, and was often surprised with fewer fish than expected to show for it.  Crappies were tough to come by, although it has/had a good population the previous year.
I drilled a hole in a relatively random location, and was surprised to see fish on the flasher right away.  I fished this spot while my buddy Jay chose a spot of his own.  The fish were aggressive, and I was laughing out loud at their willingness to play.  I caught around 20 bluegills from this spot, plus 1 crappie and 1 green sunfish.  I decided to see if there were more crappies elsewhere, so I drilled a 2nd hole closer to Jay.  There were fish there, too!  I experimented with vertical-oriented jigs, jigging spoons, waxies vs maggots for bait.  Everything worked, except I had a tough time hooking them with a Chubby Darter.  I ended up with around 10 crappies and 5 more bluegills from that spot before we called it a day.  The fish were present and active the entire time we were there!  Very fun!