My luck fishing the hard water in northeast Illinois this year has been pretty much non-existent. I’ve pulled a few fish through the ice…but nothing bigger than this dinky perch.
That finally changed in Minnesota this weekend.
We had planned to take a family trip up to Minnesota, but my wife ended up having work work, and my son had baseball and soccer. So it was just my daughter and I, taking advantage of the long President’s Day weekend, to head up to Minnesota so I could do some ice fishing with my father-in-law, and my daughter could spend some time with her grandparents.
It’s something of a running joke…when my father-in-law and I go ice fishing, we return with more empty beer cans than fish. I think the last three or four times we’ve hit the ice, we caught one pathetically small perch, and once decent sized bluegill. So my expectations weren’t overly high for the weekend, but I figured we might pull a couple fish through the ice at least.
My father-in-law, his brother, and I setup in the backwaters of the Mississippi near Winona, on about 18-20 inches of ice, with 20 feet of water below, and immediately started marking fish. After getting the ice shelter setup and tip-ups in the water, we settled in to (hopefully) catch some fish.
It wasn’t long before we started getting some bites, but I was missing hook-sets. I finally hooked a fish, and pulled a crappie up to the ice hole, only to bounce it off the edge of the ice and pull the hook out.
Not longer after, my father-in-law pulled the first fish through the ice, a nice crappie. Then I finally(!) started getting hook-ups, and putting fish on the ice. In all, we pulled seven crappie through the ice, missing at least as many in the process. I ended up catching the largest crappie, which was also my personal best at roughly 12 inches in length.
After pulling crappies through the ice, a more aggressive bite hit my bait, and I pulled up a nice, fat 12 inch perch. That fish was quickly followed by another, smaller, 6-7 inch perch. We thought we were getting on a school of perch, but just as quickly as the bite came, it died off.
In all, we put 8 fish on the ice…7 crappie, and 1 perch. It was, by far, the best day I have ever had on the ice…and resulted in some nice fish to take home.
