On Sunday I braved the cold and fished the Iowa Great Lakes. I found great ice conditions that will only improve with the cold snap. The perch bite was red hot!!! A small forage minnow spoon 1/16 ounce was the go to bait. Spikes or waxes tried both and notice know difference in success. Fish were in the 19-22 foot range. Lots of people out but the key was to stay mobile until you found the fish. Many small fish mixed in with the nice ones so bring plenty of bait!
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Big Spirit? Thinking about heading up there this weekend.
PM Sent
Nice fish Brad! How much snow is on the ice out that way?
Big spirit has spots with bare ice and some with drifts. Most of the slush should freeze solid with the temps. West bays have snow cover, main lake none. Should be a foot of ice on the main lake by this weekend.
I’ll add an update. I went out on MLK Day (Jan 18) and started out on Big Spirit. I was the only one on the lake that I could see. Set up the shack just after 8AM in about 17 ft of water. Caught a small walleye and a couple of nice, 10″ perch. It was pretty slow. Only had marks come through 5-6 times in 4 hours. I went over to West Okoboji around 1PM and set up in 19 ft. I only had a couple hours to fish but I was always marking fish and had followers pretty much constantly. Caught a handful of perch. Half were the 3-4″ variety and the other half were 9″ keepers. My bucket pretty much mirrored brad-o’s at the end of the day.
Ice on Spirit was 14-16 inches with the top couple inches being frozen slush. West had 12-14 inches of good, dark ice. A couple people were driving mid-size pickups on the ice on West.
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