Friday, January 28, 2011

Versatile Ice Fishing Jigs

On Wednesday I fished with Greg Wade of Wade's Blades Ice Fishing Jigs. I tied on more jigs wednesday than any other day of ice fishing in my life. It was amazing to see the fish react different to each style and color of jig from basically the same fishing holes. Usually I am just a bait guy who focusses on using fresh bait on any sort of jig to catch fish, but I am slowly and surely becoming a jig guy.

Anyhow we took quite a bit of video footage and a bunch of pictures. Here are a few:

Greg makes most of his jigs by hand with premium and very sharp fishing hooks. Also another thing I really liked is he paints them too and there is no paint goo in any of the eyelets! That is super annoying about most mass produced jigs!! I now am the proud owner of pretty much a lifetime supply of ice fishing jigs (unless I lose them over the summer), but actually now that I think of it I will be using them during the summer as well. They are going to be dynamite for many open water bluegill and crappie fishing applications!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Monster Bass Ice Fishing

I have been working on this very young trophy bass lake for 2 years and it has been producing several 5 lb bass this winter through the ice like this one:

Well today we just raised the bar up a few more notches! Check out the size of this bass that Chris caught on a large fathead minnow this morning. This fish is going to the taxidermist!

Chris has two lakes right next to each other. One we are managing for trophy bass and the other we are managing for trophy bluegill. All the small bass come out of the trophy bass lake and go into the trophy bluegill lake. On the flip side, all of the small bluegill come out of the trophy bluegill lake and go into the trophy bass lake.

The lakes are still very very young, but are producing some amazing fish!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

How to Create a Big Bluegill Lake

Deep infertile lakes with limited bluegill reproduction and bunches of skinny hungry stunted bass seem to naturally produce monster bluegills consistently. In the deep clear water there usually aren't many bluegill per acre, but on average they are big. Fertile lakes tend to grow lots of bluegill, but typically on average they aren't very big. I have noticed this time and time again while out electrofishing lakes across the midwest and have been using that information to grow big bluegill in lakes that don't naturally grow them. Here are some guidelines to follow to consistently grow big bluegills:

The recipe is to take out all the largemouth bass over 14 inches and to stock extra 10-12 inch bass. Keep em stunted and hungry. Also a few other things to do is to take away all the cover and structure in shallow water less than 10 feet deep so baby bluegill get eaten up right away. We don't want them to live and eat up the big bluegills food supply. If you wanted to grow fat would you want to share your pizza with a bunch of kids? In regards to good structure for a bluegill lake, simply add just a couple HUGE reefs in deeper water about 15-25 feet deep. These will be your year round fishing spots.

Also don't get crazy by stocking tons of species of fish and never ever let a catfish go when caught. Catfish are the absolute worst catch and release fish on the planet. You can always catch em once or twice, but very very rarely will you catch the same catfish more than twice in a pond. They are actually the smartest fish in the whole pond, old wise fish are not easy to catch. If they can't be caught they are just wasting space and resources.

For people who like catfish fishing in their pond just simply eat the ones you catch and then stock more every year or two, they are very cheap to buy and easy to grow. Catch rates will actually go up by using this method, plus I make more money when I can convince people to stock fish regularly........thats what most of you are thinking anyway so I might as well go out and say it.

So there are few tips to creating a big bluegill pond, now here are some pics from a lake that naturally follows suit with all of the above specs: It is deep, clear, relatively infertile, has limited shoreline cover and bunches of skinny hungry bass, and it produces bunches of big 12-15 ounce bluegill every year! Ice fishing today on the lake was no exception. Here are some pics:

The lake is completely full of these pesky bass. There is very rarely ever a bass over 14 inches caught out of this lake, they all are 13.5 inches long and perfect for wiping out yoy bluegill.

Here is the catfish being caught and kept for dinner!

So this lake is consistently pumping out 3/4 lb bluegill. Now what to do to grow even bigger bluegills? Well, at this stage of the game for this lake now its time to start supplementally feeding high protein fish food to these gills to push them over the one pound mark. Starting in April I will feed them aquamax 500 twice per day all the way through September. Also I wouldn't remove any bluegills from the lake over 9 inches for this year and take out a couple hundred of the 6-8 inchers. Next year at this time when I go back to this lake ice fishing we will be holding up 16-20 ouncers instead of 12-15 ouncers!

Two years from now we will be holding up lots of 20-24 ounce bluegills! This is a very fun project to say the least, I absolutely love growing boone and crockett bluegills!

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Football and Fishing on the Ice

We took 16 people ice fishing on Sunday afternoon. The trip almost didn't happen due to the Bears making it much farther into the playoffs than they should of, but we decided instead of canceling that we would just combine and bring the game right out onto the ice! Turned out to be a pretty stinkin' awesome football party if a do say so myself!

The combination of football, food, and fishing just can't be beat. Here are some pics of our party on the ice. Chef did a bit of scouting before everyone arrived and found a pretty good bass spot:

Automatic fisherman are great for large groups. Just set the rod and its a free for all for whoever gets there first when a fish hits. For some reason the big dude kept getting knocking over the kids en route to the fish.......j/k this picture was actually staged.

Here is a new Chef Todd fish sandwich recipe that you simply must try!

Here are some fresh bluegill fillets marinating in a secret yellow marinade:

This guy was dialed in on the big perch!

Chef cooked up another feast of burgers, brats, deer loins, and fish sandwiches!

This dude's head stayed warm and he was a fish catching machine!

It was cold so we took a couple loads of fish up to the shed to keep them from freezing solid. We cleaned over 300 bluegill after the game.

He beat the big dude for this one!

Here is our football cave before the game.

Not quite a booner, but tasty would be more like it. We caught bunches of fish today, but the big boys didn't come out to play.

There are a bunch of 150 inch class bruiser bluegill in this lake, but it seemed like just the females and small boys wanted to eat today. At the end of the day we still ended up with a BUNCH of fish meat! Good thing we had help cleaning the fish or we probably would still be there slicing away!!

During the game there was only about 2 minutes of actual hope for the Bears. Hey sometimes its better to be lucky than good....unfortunately that wasn't the case on Sunday.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Camera Overload: Muskie, Bluegill, Crappie....

Saturday I took 14 people guided ice fishing to Otter Creek Preserve. The bait shop in Lewiston wasn't open when we drove by at 8 am, so it was a good thing Steve had a bunch of minnows even though I told him I would have all the bait!

Anyhow we caught some AMAZING fish, despite the freezing cold weather. Here are a couple pics of the first tiger muskie of the day:

That musky was stocked into the 50 acre canadian lake as a young of the year fingerling in the fall of 2008! As this lake was filling in 2007 we stocked a bunch of shiners, shad, pumkinseeds, and fatheads. By the time we stocked the gamefish in the fall of '08, every square inch of the lake was filled with baby forage. Kind of amazing how fast fish grow when all they have to do is open their mouths while swimming to eat!

Here is the second tiger muskie of the day. Quite a bit smaller than the first, but still a great 3 year old fish and an awesome fish to catch through the ice:

We also caught some great bluegills on the VIP lake:

Before you make too much fun of Chad for his dink bluegill, wait till you see the next pic below it! He totally redeems himself with the biggest gil of the day!

This bluegill had a really cool skin disorder or he was playing a role in some sort of scary fish movie or something:

Had a gourmet ice fishing shore lunch catered by Chef Todd:

These big largemouth bass kept the automatic fisherman rigged with minnows popping:

And we finished off the day with a couple buckets full of crappie from the big lake:

I got home at 8 pm and then cleaned this bucket of crappie for some residents of the old folks home on skyline drive. The person who bought the ice fishing trip today wanted to make sure they had some fresh fish to eat!

Brook wasn't too happy to come home to her kitchen sink full of thawing crappies, but she couldn't stay mad when she found out they were for the nursing home! What an amazing day of ice fishing, food and fun outdoors during the middle of winter!!