Ice plastics

[weltzing63]

Awesome story! Love those kinds of trips to local hot spots. Happens quite often on one of my favorite lakes to ice fish. This time though it is the 1" ice stinger in a custom pink color and purple flake. This color paired with a gold jig of any sorts is HOT on this particular lake. Using my own handmade long rod that nobody has seen before in this neck of the woods, really gets the crowd looking...they are dumbfounded to see me throw a 13" crappie back down the hole, since on this lake the norm is to get your 10 and go home...many on lookers coming to investigate and play 20 questions,  I'm happy to share though!

[Muskygary]

What do you guys think about color when ice fishing? I ask because I'm a poor ice fisherman! I poured up some clear plastic with only UV blast in it to try this winter. Wondering if I should make up some pink and maybe red ice ticklers ? Any advice?

[weltzing63]

I think color plays a role, but so does the jig size and size of plastic equally. I fish a lot of dirty water and the purples, reds, pinks, blacks are a good choice. Also fish quite a few clear water lakes, and the same thing, pinks, reds, purples blacks, Brown, etc. There's that saying about using natural colors in clear water and bright colors in stained water...im not a huge believer. I believe that you have to find the active fish, get on the schools, and jigging technique.

 I'm not huge on the UV nor do I fish them at all. Glows have their place and time, but I typically don't use them. 

[ctom]

I think you're in line on colors Weltzing, just dump the pink. lol Blood red, black, purple are always good colors under the ice. Still, the glow and glow red, glow purple are fish catchers too and the uv enhanced will also do their part in catching fish. More and more in the last few years I have been impressed with very late season and very early season open water results using clear/glitter baits and by earl I'm sharing open water with ice.

I also found that ice anglers are a market and most will want colors that you maybe do use personally and the best way to stall a business is to not offer what THEY want....just food for thought here. I make 9 colors in what I call my "angler pack" that offers 20 of each color but personally only used three with any regularity and still only use those three in early and later season open water if and when I have to size down my plastic offering.

"I believe that you have to find the active fish, get on the schools, and jigging technique."....this I absolutely think is the most spot on advice on could give. In my last years on the ice I looked like a non-conformist when it came to where and how I fished. I simply fished in areas where larger and more fish were feeding and stayed entirely away from community locations for the most part, yet its amazing how close in proximity to those community the better bite was actually taking place. The last three years I was on ice I never took the pop up, just fished sitting on the open side door of the van. I flicked the locator on just long enough to show the depth some mid-column fish and then set the electronics back in the van. In most instances I was within 100 feet of the so called hot spot all by myself looking like I hadn't a clue. My secret was that 95% of the time I used the same sized plastics and colors that I normally used in open water. These were fished on 1/32 and 1/64 ballheads without collars, just like in open water. Everybody thinks that ice makes crappies eat daintily. Wrong. Small crappies eat that way...the big guys EAT and the overall size of what's being offered plays as much a part as color. Think back to those jigging spoons with the nuggies. That was not a demure bait being dropped down, maybe 1 and a half inches overall. Finding those feeding fish just opens up a whole other bunch of layers to the catching equation, but its a dynamite first step.

[weltzing63]

Pink is HAWT! Lol, but I would say my top two catching colors last winter were red and pink. Pink with a little purple flake actually.. I definitely agree about fishing the outside edges of the burbs (shanty towns). When there's a lot of noise and pressure in one area the fish tend to move, not a lot, but just far enough away from the noise.

Don't be afraid to drill a lot of holes! My tournament partner and I have converted a Milwaukee and dealt drill set ups with 5" laser augers. Fast, light weight, and very quiet. I also whole heartedly believe that the bite doesn't just "shut down ". The fish MOVE, be mobile and follow that school of fish!!

[Muskygary]

Thanks guys, very interesting subject. With the ice being so late the last couple of years (and expected to be late this year) would you look for the fish (in open water )to still be around the deep holes? Or where would you expect them to locate?

[weltzing63]

All depends on the body of water. Typically you will find fish first in the same areas as you will during late fall though.

[Muskygary]

With this fall being so warm, I'm going to leave my boat in the lake, put some 4# line on a couple of reels with ice jigs and see what I can learn!

[ctom]

I'll see crappies staying on docks much later into the deep fall when water temps are still warmed than they should be but a lot of that is because the shoals of pin minnows are found in and around those docks. During the day those dock suck up heat and the heat is dispersed into the water after the sun sets and this helps hold the forage. Chronologically though, crappies are creatures driven by more than water temps and forage and one day they'll be there and catchable, the next day they're gone, nary a trace of them. I can move from the marina to where I know they are during the winter and there they are. Like many creatures, moon phase and available light will move fish for no apparent reason so don't bank everything on water temps.

[weltzing63]

All this talk sure gets me fired up for ice!!

[Paneltruck.lures]

All this talk sure gets me fired up for ice!!

Yeah me too, the problem is I live in Oklahoma.......

I have wanted to go ice fishing since the first time I saw a ice fishing shanty on TV probably when I was in middle school

[Lines]

I'm sort of in agreement with a comment my friend made. Ice and fishing do go hand in hand, as long as the ice is covering my Miller Lite inside the cooler.

[ctom]

SE Iowa might not dole out too much safe ice, depending on how much of that Miller Lite you enjoy. 

I gave up ice fishing because of a number of things, mostly because I'm getting old and too independent to fish with somebody if the itch hits. I've been thru the ice three times and gotten lucky. At some point I figured the luck would run out. My biggest concern was falling on the ice and breaking a leg, or arm, or hip. Broken anything is not on my list. And there are aspects of ice fishing that over the recent years prior to my stopping I quite simply do not agree with anymore and chose not to be a part of it, but that's personal.

On nice days when holes stay open I'll wander out and fish ice some but I am not serious about it. I just enjoy being out when the weather is nice. I make ice baits for many people and a shop or two, but even that has gotten cut back a little.

If you want to have some fun with a buddy, try this.

I did some remodeling for a friend. He and another guy were going to Lake Mille Lacs for three days to fish and were planning on sleeping inside their hub shelter. I finished up my work just before he came home to pack and leave so I waited on him. He had his stuff all laid out and as a prank I took a piece of aluminum foil and cut out a half dozen little circles using a paper punch and stuck them shiny side up on some clear packing tape and then stuck the tape to the face of his transducer and trimmed it so no edges showed, then packed the locator back up nice. They got up there to fish but it was soon apparent that something was not right with his locator...seems he had some fish that appeared at the same place in the water column regardless of the depth or power his unit was operating on and had red lines all over the place. His body had no problems. Fret time set in. By midnight he was drinking heavily since he couldn't use his locator to fish. Drove him nuts. On Saturday morning he drove all the way back to the Twin Cities, leaving his buddy out on the ice, to find some place to check out his locator. When he finally found a shop open I guess he about wet himself when those little dots of foil were found  and the best part was he could never figure out how they got there in the first place but his wife took the brunt of the blame, but of course she could look him straight in the eye with a straight face and tell him she had no idea what the heck he was talking about. Then he started looking back at people he last fished with and was suspecting them. After a couple months I asked him if he ever found some tape with silver dots on it stuck in his carpeting saying I couldn't find that which I'd had when I was doing his remodeling. I finally fessed up but that tape drove him nuts.  Which fits in pretty much with every ice angler I ever met. I'm just happy I'm cured. 

[weltzing63]

Wow, he really couldn't fish without his vexilar could he?!  I would also be lost without mine, but it's sometimes nice to hole hop without lugging the vex around. Electronics are virtually useless if fishing any type of backwaters/shallow water. We fished some backwaters on the Mississippi a couple of years ago and we found big slab crappies that were holding up in shallow water weeds. Im talking 2-4 FOE. Something that I've never experienced before.

 Long rods rule these types of waters.  We are currently making a couple of changes to our prototypes and will be revealing our Panfish Pursuers line of long rods soon! 

[ctom]

All I use anymore are a couple 6 foot rods I built on St.Croix blanks that were custom made-for a business and rated at 1/64 ounce and 2 pound line. I really snuck in on these two rod blanks. I paid $9.00 each for these suckers and wouldn't trade either for $500.00. I use 2 or 3 pound Nanofil on size 750 Shimano Symetre reels on these. They are my dock rods big time. If I happen to wander over to the trout lake here in town I take a little longer rod, 6'3" on an ultra-light frame and fish with 1/32 and 1/16 ounce stuff, most jigging spoons tipped with a small plastic tail for some color. I use the same rod if I happen to do walleyes but I seldom do ice any more. Its got to be darned near lawn mowing temperature for me to get on ice.

Its amazing how many people who claim to be good anglers haven't a clue and are crippled if they don't have their electronic addiction with them. I have a locator in the boat but use it only to see what the bottom is like and water depth. I sold my Marcum a year before I stopped ice fishing as I seldom used it. I know a lot of river backwaters that hold crappies just about all year that are seldom over 6 feet deep but they all have one thing in common.....weeds. Even in the winter.