How do you find them on a new lake or a lake you don’t fish often? It seems these areas can be critical for catching all species at times but they don’t necessarily follow contours and many times aren’t marked well or at all in most cases on maps. So… if I can’t get to the lake during the open water season and figure these things out, how do you go about finding these critical transitions under the ice?
GPS and maps are a great starting point, also you can somewhat tell what the bottom is by the strength of the return on your flasher. A thicker red bottom is generally hard, and a thinner red return from the bottom is sand or mud.
A camera is of course the best way to tell, but you can also drop a weight to the bottom and tell if it is mud or hard. You can make up a mini anchor type weight and drop it to the bottom and see what you come up with, mud, weeds, you can also feel rocks or a very hard bottom.
Great methods listed above.
Summer it the easiest time to figure this out if you can. Prep-work for winter can pay off huge in time savings. One thing to do if leave the rods on shore so you are not tempted to fish.
Graphing a lake that has no or bad contour map will save huge time over drilling holes and in most cases these poor maps will miss lots of structure.
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