We arrived at your location shortly around 10:30 am lots of huts already on the ice, so we needed to get away from the crowd, so we made our way out past the rest of the ice anglers and set up a couple hundred yards from the closest person in 13 feet of water. We drill a few holes and set up our lines.
I was deadsticking a large shiner minnow on an Eyeball Jig outside our popup hut held in my Shealth Quick Release rod holder attached to my ice fishing sled.
Inside the hut I was sight fishing looking down the holes alternatively between using small Jigging Raps and small tungsten jigs tipped with live maggots.
After about 30 minutes we only had 2 keeper perch and a couple little ones, we could see we were just on the edge of a weed bed and the perch would dart out to look at our baits but did not like to hang out for long over the open sand bottom. So we reel in our rods and make a slight move to set up over the low carpet of weeds. The little move paid off and for the next couple hours we had steady action of small schools of good size perch coming in the our baits very few minutes. As well as a few pike we could see cruising under us, but they were not into hitting any of out baits, even when we dropped down a larger spoon or deadsticked a minnow, but the perch action kept us busy, at sometimes too busy.
In the end we probably caught at least 60 to 70 perch between the two of us and brought home a nice bunch between 10 and 14 inches.
My buddy with a couple nice ones.
All in all not a bad day on the ice.
Heading back to shore my Erie Secrets Sled fully loaded.
I just keep a few nice ones and sent my buddy home with a nice family feed of fresh perch.
Perch tacos on Monday!!!
JimW
