We hope everyone has had a good start to 2021. We’ve finally been able to get on the ice after a slow, warm start to the hard-water season. First off, a friendly reminder to everyone hitting the ice this winter, be safe! There’s a lot of sketchy ice out there still. If someone tells you there’s 8″ of ice on a lake, don’t assume that they actually measured it, twice this year I’ve had people tell me there’s a specific ice depth on a body of water and the measurement has been off by 3-5″. Always be sure to measure it yourself and check the ice thickness as you go, we’ve seen lots of inconsistencies where a body of water may have 6-10″ along the shoreline then 40yds out it drops to 4-5″
We’ve been targeting pike and trout with some great success over the past couple of weeks. We’ve been fishing the Waterbury Reservoir and have been doing pretty well with brown trout as well as smelt. Most of the trout we’ve been catching have been between 8 and 15ft down over 25-40ft of water. The best success has come to use on tip ups while running smelt as bait. The smelt fishing has been awesome, it seems like just about every hole we’ve drilled we’ve been able to come up with as many smelt as we need/want. Those have been hanging out in similar depths, sometimes we’ll be able to find a school only a couple of feet under the ice but for the most part 8-15ft down. It’s been super productive during both the day and night! A hali tipped with one maggot has been all we’ve needed to get the smelt. The pike fishing we’ve been doing has mostly taken place on Elmore along with a couple other bodies of water. Been picking up pike in anywhere from 2ft out to about 13ft of water. We like to run a mix shiners along with some smaller perch that we jig up. Somedays the perch will out catch the shiners and other days it’s the opposite. Most likely it’s coincidental but it’s always nice to play around and see what works best.
Just a heads up we do have bait in stock! Heavy Mediums and Medium Shiners along with crawlers and maggots! Our hours are 10-6 Monday-Saturday and 10-4 on Sunday and we are running guided ice fishing trips daily!! Don’t forget that this Saturday is FREE Fishing Day!! If you’ve got a friend that’s never gone ice fishing and doesn’t have a license take advantage of it!!