Want to really knock ‘em dead at first-ice? Return to where you caught ‘em from the boat last month. Knowing where the fish were biting this fall will be more valuable at first-ice than remembering where they bit last year.
“I could certainly fish memories, but I had a really good fall bite that will get my first-ice attention,” says In-Depth Outdoors Pro-Staffer Cal Svihel.
Fellow IDO Pro-Staffers Will Roseberg and Paul Delaney follow a similar protocol.
“The best fall walleye trolling reports on Mille Lacs were coming from the Vineland Bay area, so that’s most likely where I’ll start fishing at first-ice,” Roseberg says.
Delaney, a full-time guide in Door County, Wisconsin, takes notes while open-water walleye fishing before ice-up. “At first-ice, I’ll return to where there were still stands of green weeds in the fall, where baitfish were holding. These will be key areas to target.”
Green weeds “equal bait,” Svihel explains. “Which means walleyes will be nearby to eat your spoon or minnow.”
Angler shorthand for focusing almost exclusively on spots that produced in the past, “fishing memories” CAN yield bites. But it can also result in busts, so don’t “be married” to one spot, says In-Depth Outdoors TV Host James Holst.
“One of the things about fishing first-ice is that you just don’t have any reports to go on,” he says. “Sure, you can rely on past performance, but even the best information that’s available is a year old. … So if you don’t hop on fish right away, or in a reasonable amount of time, get out of there.”
Roseberg fishes his first-ice “go-to” spots similarly. “I’ll hit ‘em to see if they’re holding fish or baitfish, but if I don’t like what I see, I’m not going to stick around for more than an hour, hoping they’ll be good just because they were the previous year,” he says. “Often, all it takes is moving a few hundred yards in the same area to find fish.”
“That’s what first ice really is all about,” Holst says. “Check out a bunch of different spots, see what the fish are up to.”
IDO Pro-Staffer Quintin Biermann targets the same stretch of isolated, fallen timber, at first-ice each year, but moves out when it gets crowded. “People move in on it after a few days of safe ice,” he says. “But by then, I know what depth to focus on and I’m off employing the same pattern on similar pieces of structure elsewhere in the same water body.”
IDO Pro-Staffer Joel Nelson “stacks the odds” in his favor by fishing ponds and small lakes, which ice-up sooner. “They get me on the ice faster and the fish don’t have as many places to hide,” he says. If he doesn’t mark fish quickly in his go-to starting spots, he’ll move gradually deeper in the general area. “Sometimes, they don’t move far,” he says.
If last year’s first-ice hot spot proves less than fantastic this winter, too few green weeds could be at fault. The walleye food chain links back to green vegetation – walleyes feed on baitfish that feeds on micro-organisms that feed on green weeds. But myriad factors affect the longevity of healthy green weeds and the depth at which they will survive after ice-up. So if your go-to spot doesn’t produce this winter, search nearby for green vegetation.
“If there’s clear ice no snow cover, you can often find green weeds just by looking down through the ice,” IDO Pro-Staffer Bryan Myers says. “Otherwise, a color underwater camera is a must.”
Continue the conversation …
Where do you start fishing at first-ice? What’s your back-up plan, should your go-to spot(s) not produce? Got a follow-up question for an IDO pro-staffer? Keep the conversation going in the comments section below, or on In-Depth Outdoors’ Facebook page [https://www.facebook.com/InDepthOutdoorsTV].
