Midwinter Icefishing Slump

I went fishing last weekend on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.  The ice is near 2 feet thick, so it quickly becomes important to make sure that this is where you want the hole dug.  Saturday I ended up getting into some nice crappies on a brushpile in the north creek channel of Pleasant Creek lake. I was using a mid-sized Swedish pimple tipped with some wax worms that I had found in the grain solo of my grandpa’s farm (this is a great way to get hundreds of worms in a matter of minutes, just ask a farmer if he has any spilled grain anywhere on the farm and that’s where the wax worms will be).  However, I was limited with time as the last twilight of the sun’s light soon left the lake and the bitter cold started biting through my boots and gloves. I was surprised with the decent luck because of midwinter’s ability to shut down the fishing.

I decided that I would try this spot the next day.  On Sunday afternoon Spencer and I went to the north end of the lake to go back to the same brush pile and hopefully if I had patterned these fish correctly they would be there again.  However, I found some other fisherman there when we pulled up to the snow covered lot where I had parked before.  Doing the sportsman like thing I had decided that we would fish somewhere else and not crowd the fisherman that had got up early to get the worm (and the fish).  We spent near two hours unsuccessfully looking for a similar “setup” of both structure, depth (similar position as the creek channel, and of course time of day was already similar. 

The midwinter hunt for fish is just so difficult and countless articles have been written about it.  I have noticed this year that bass and crappies migrate non-stop during this time of the hard-water season on lakes and something I have never observed before but the fish migrate on ponds only about a half acre large.  This is making even pond fishing difficult, which is usually my backup to when the large lakes are too difficult to pattern. We tried the “backup” pond on the north end of the Pleasant Creek park and again couldn’t even find the fish on the half-acre pond. 

I’ll be heading out quicker next weekend to the brush pile to claim the spot and maybe the crappies will be there again. Anyways…good luck, and good fishing.