1-7-11 Report

[John Carlson]

Ice is great, the rain was a blessing getting all the slush nocked down and then the cold temps froze it up solid. Reports of most area lakes having well over a foot of ice with some lakes pushing 20". Make sure you have a good set of cleats, the ice surface is pretty slick with that little dusting of snow on it.

Walleye and Pike action has been great. As Brandon said in an earlier report, they have been finding the bigger fish close to deeper water. Use a walleye sucker or a golden shiner close to the bottom on a tip-up for the Walleye. For Pike I like set my large golden shiner a few feet to a few inches under the ice. A pike is built to hunt, it swims around looking for an easy meal above it.

Jigging seems to be the way to go. If you haven't tried jigging for walleye or pike your missing out. I like to set 2 tip-ups and then drill a few extra holes around them and then out into deeper water. Then I take my flasher and jump from hole to hole just like I was panfishing. If you want to know more about jigging stop by the store, I will be happy to answer any questions and show you what you would need to get started. Jigging is a great way to find some mid day action.

Crappie fishing is picking up, most of them are being found around deep mud flats and hanging close to the bottom. Plastics, Gulp and minnows are all catching fish. Gills are also moving deeper with reports of them comming off of the deeper 20' cribs and wood. I like using a Diamond Jig tipped with 3 spikes for deep water gills. I like the Diamond style jig because it gets down fast and shows up great on electronics.

Good Luck

[JGarcia]

How can you tell with a flasher if the bottom is a mud flat or sand or has weeds?

[John Carlson]

It's not that easy to tell sand from muck on a flasher but on the harder bottom more single is getting bounced back to the flasher and the bottom appears to be thicker, if your using a color flasher the bottom is a thick with a lot of red, a softer bottom sucks up the single and has a thinner bottom line or in color shows up as green or yellow. It takes a lot of time spent with the electronics to learn what your looking at. A good topo map helps too and will tell you what type of bottom should be there. Weeds will look like clutter on the flasher that you cant get rid of, they will be yellow or green at the lowest power setting, if they are really thick they may show up as fish but as soon as you start to fish there you find that they are weeds when you hook them...

[JGarcia]

Thats what I thought but I wasnt always sure thanks for the tips!!