Fish-Hawk.Net

Final days of March and hard to believe that in a month I will probably be catching fish without having to haul a ton of gear and drill holes in the water. Last year my first catfish was April 21.

Ice is nice but the brute force, hard labour we call Ice Fishing is almost over. Don't get me wrong... Ice fishing is a weird pastime that I will continue to pursue until it is no longer safe and today was one of the reasons why. Went to a new spot that did not really pan out for the fish that I was trying for the very first time (Lake Trout). Fell back to 15' water and started playing with some perch. While I was walking around (and the first time this season that I did not anchor my rod holder) I just managed to save my rod from the hole: 6.1 lbs!! Not a bad way to end the winter!

Rod

Way to go! I saw some posts on Facebook of another group fishing same lake, same entry point as you, and they were nailing the pike too. You certainly did better than our group outing to lake x.

scarkner wrote:Way to go! I saw some posts on Facebook of another group fishing same lake, same entry point as you, and they were nailing the pike too. You certainly did better than our group outing to lake x.

Yeah, I saw a group just off the other shallow bay. Pretty sure that the pike are starting to stack up near their spawn areas. Really like those Danielsson jackfish rigs you put me onto. By using varied leader lengths (short at the top and long on the bottom) you can get a really big depth range for your bait! While the perch were chewing on the minnow about 1.5 feet off the bottom while the pike took the top one almost 4 feet off the bottom.