January 23rd-24th ice fishing report

[Ty Sennett]

On the 23rd I had Chris Thomas and a few of his friends out and we jumped around a lot to find panfish on the Chip. We caught a heck of a lot of little perch and some crappie and bluegill to go with the little waxworm stealers. We did get one 9 inch bluegill. I took a picture but it didn't turn out the best inside the icehouse. Pretty darn big bluegill if I don't say so myself. I threw back one big crappie that was around 12 to 13 inches and we kept some smaller ones to eat. We usually throw back any crappie over 11 inches. There are plenty of those 9 to 11 inchers to go around and they eat well. We also had quite a few tipups go up but had a bad hit to catch ratio on those for some reason. We did keep some pike. I don't remember how many we ended up with. We had a good time. I'd say the fishing was average but I think the crew learned a lot about technique in ice fishing. There's a lot more finnesse in ice fishing.

Yesterday a couple of buddies came out with me and we fished crappie and bluegill all day. We didn't find anything out in deeper water except an overabundance of perch. We kept about ten perch but it took catching about twenty perch to get one keeper. We got tired of catching little perch so we finally found some big bluegill in shallow. We moved to a good crappie spot later and got our limit of crappie/perch/bluegill. I think the highlite of the day was figuring out that RayJay's pizza reheated on the woodburning stove is darn good.

There is about 12 to 16 inches of ice on the Chip right now.