Happy New Years! We have received a lot of snow throughout the area and the extra snow cover has changed up fishing and travel on the lakes. As a result of our heavy snow, it has slowed down the formation of ice on our lakes and even though some areas were thirty below zero we didn’t form that much new ice, sadly. This has been a leading factor to some Rangers and pickups going through the ice on local lakes. I have been hearing mixed reports of some lakes having some slush, I have not seen it personally yet. I’m also hearing reports that some lakes will have 12-14 inches of ice and a few hundred yards away they have 8-9 inches.
Fishing reports have been also hit and miss due to people getting out due to the snow. A few bigger lakes have some nice roads plowed because a few guides are running rental shacks on them. On Sunday when I was fishing a group came through and started drilling holes on the road, fished for 10-15 minutes then moved further down the road and did the same. People are kind enough to plow roads please respect the road by not drilling holes on it or setting your house up on the road. Last year I kept up a few roads and when people did this it caused nothing but headaches for plowing and running the risk of breaking equipment due to laziness.
Walleye bite was going right before the new years and the bite also went through the day with guys picking up a limit or two of walleyes during the day in their permeant shacks. Breaks on the edges of flats with rock bottoms seemed to be the ticket and you didn’t need to be extremely deep with some being in that 12-15 feet range. After New Years I’m hearing some people struggling but I have a feeling they slid out into deeper water and holes because I’m seeing them getting caught in basins while crappie fishing. Spoons tipped with fat heads jigging on or near bottom produced well with dead stick rods with minnows about a foot from bottom helped with a curious but hesitant fish.
Panfish bite has been steady to slowly picking up depending on if you are fishing shallow/weeds or basins. With the snowfall weeds are going to start die and that will cause a drop in the oxygen level in the shallows. As a result, the fish will slide into deeper water chasing food and more stable oxygen. I had a great trip over the weekend fishing a deeper basin and all our fish were surprisingly the bottom five feet. I went back to the same spot a few days later and our first five fish were five different species. I had luck with jigging baits like the Kender T-Rip or Eurotackle Z-Viber Micro in Wonder Bread colors and when the fish seemed not as aggressive, I switched to a 4 mm tungsten jig tipped with a Panfish Pirate plastic in a Ripper or Zoid in pink or white tipped with one wax worm. Crappies were aggressive but you had to keep jigging/twitching your jig the whole time and when they would bite, they would hold onto your jig and not swim away so you needed to focus on your rod tip to watch for the bite and before you would jig slightly lift your rod to see if you had extra weight from a fish. When the bite got extremely tough, we had best luck with a 4 mm or downgrading to a 3 mm tungsten with a plain Ripper plastic no bait. The second trip I set up a plain minnow down where the fish were coming through hoping for action but only picked up small pike instead.
I had customers that used their own rods on a trip, and I want to bring up a topic that most might not think makes a difference but with the invasion of zebra muscles on a lot of our lakes I think it is making a difference. The type of line you use, and the thickness makes a difference. I had 3 people in one house, and we got 18 very nice crappies. Two of the three people were using 3-pound test fluorocarbon line and they caught 15 fish and the person using 6-pound mono caught three. The person who caught three was using the same exact lure as the rest of us and in the same portable fish house so the only thing we can think is that the line thickness was the ultimate deciding factor. I run 100% fluorocarbon line because of the visibility factor and in my opinion its worth the added price to put quality line on a rod. The other thing I have noticed with fluorocarbon is that it seems to be stronger than monofilament and this allows me to downsize my line thickness by one to two and sometimes three pounds and it helps with a panfish bite allowing me to feel those light bites.
I think we are in the heart of our traditional winter patterns and fishing will only be picking up in the next few weeks and this will benefit a lot of us since they will be in our normal winter spots going forward. Get away from the crowds and don’t be afraid to change things up with colors/plastics/types of lures being used especially in a group in a house.