Last Trip of 2016
My Dad and I decided to head out in the morning to get on some perch in the islands. We had spotted a gap in the forecast where the wind was going to dissipate and switch directions early in the day, but then pick back up to 15-20 MPH. With the truck already loaded up with all of our gear, we were able to just jump out of bed, get dressed, and hit the road. When we arrived at our first spot, Dillenbeck, we saw only a couple people on the ice. Three Perch fishermen and group of people pike fishing didn’t exactly get my hopes up, but we were going to give it a shot. Once out there we found plenty of ice with very little water. I have only fished Dillenbeck once before and I didn’t remember it being that shallow, 3-5 FOW for a LONG ways. As we got farther out, the bottom began to slowly drop away below us. After a good 45 minutes, we still had a skunk tagging along in our sled. It wasn’t until we found 10+ FOW that I got my first bite. Tick, tick.... THUMP. I had the 6 inch yellow up the hole in seconds. My hopes for the day were renewed as my jig plummeted back towards the bottom, tipped with fresh spikes. Ten minutes passed without another nibble. We left the bay with only four iced perch and one in the bucket.
The second spot that we tried looked a lot more promising, with a giant shanty town about 3/4 of a mile from the parking lot. As I opened my door I was greeted by a stiff South wind, 20 MPH, gusting into the upper twenties and low thirties. I talked to a couple guys coming off the ice who said that they had filled almost a full pail with perch, but the bite had just shut off. Story of our lives! Everytime we get to go jigging for panfish, we find out that we “should’ve been there the yesterday”. Not willing to take the risk of wasting 15 minutes just walking to the shanty town, we set up shop 200 yards from the truck and began jigging. I caught a perch right off the bat, with only a couple follow up nibbles after that. Another bust. By the end of the day we had plenty of practice loading and unloading the sleds into the truck.
We headed south as the winds continued to pick up. As we pulled into the parking area of our last resort location, we noticed that the ice was PACKED! There were tip-ups absolutely everywhere, with people jigging for bluegills all throughout them. I decided to bring my shanty and sled out there, not to actually set up, but instead to use as a windbreak. By placing the packed sled on the windward side of the hole, I was able to keep snow from drifting into it and filling it up in seconds. It is also really helpful to have a windbreak in 25+ MPH winds whenever you are trying to detect light biting ‘gills on an UL rod. I started off this part of our trip with back to back bluegills and nothing for a while. I now had three fish in my bucket at this point and my fish fry was looking pretty wimpy. As usual with sunfish, I was only able to coax one bite in each hole and had to keep moving around to find any fish at all.
Around 2:30 or so, I had an older man, with a Clam flip over, pull up right beside me. I just figured that he was struggling to catch fish and that he must’ve seen one of my signature “Oh look everyone, I got a fish!!”, rip their lips off, hook sets, and decided to crash my “party.” Boy was I wrong. The guy was only 15 yards away from me and yet he was catching monster sunfish after monster sunfish. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I must've stared at him for ten minutes straight, studying every move that he made and straining my eyes to try and catch a glimpse of the tiny jig that he had on the end of his line. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, until I decided to give his unique jigging style a try. BOOM. I got hit on the first drop by a nice Bluegill. The fish made an empty CLUNK as he hit the bottom of my pail. On the second drop I caught another and another one after that. Pretty soon the CLUNKS began to turn into THUDS as the bottom of my bucket disappeared out of sight. By copying this “bluegill master’s” jigging technique, I was able to turn one fish in each hole into one or two dozen!! I was so busy catching fish that I didn’t even realize that almost everyone had left and that I was one of only three people on the ice, enduring the driving snow and winds (some gusts just about took you off of your feet if you were caught off guard!) It was just my Dad, myself, and this really enthusiastic young man who had caught probably over 4 dozen fish out of one hole!
The bite ended up shutting off right before dark and neither of us were able to find anything, but the stray baby gill here and there. I left the ice that day with a smile. Although we only ended up catching 2 dozen keeper bluegills and 1 perch, it was still a really fun day on the hardwater!!
