Some of our most memorable stories on the ice are when people come crowding in on us. we don’t have a ton of bigger bodies of water so most of our local fishing spots are public borrow pits and canals.
There is an old guy we had met years ago and occasionally run into each other on the ice. its 2012 and we finally get ice almost the end of january down here in illinois. we fish a public borrow pit on friday and just put the hammer down on some brush that isn’t really known by many.
We show up the next morning and there are a group of guys on some older xmas trees that are almost gone. we keep on our way to our spot when my buddy recognizes the old guy we see here or there and is like i’m gonna go talk to them
I say, don’t they’ll see that as an invitation to come over and fish next to us. he thinks i’m crazy and goes over there. i head over to the spot set up and just start hammer time again. he comes back over joins me, within 20 minutes, old guy is on his way over and in 15 more minutes his 3 buddies make their way over. we both are like oh know. he’s like you were right my bad.
We had about 40 holes drilled and had to move around those holes to keep on them. these guys basically surrounded us, and set up in all our holes…like 10′ from the ones we were fishing. we are good sports and what transpired next made it worth it.
These guys fished old school with bobbers. just dropped em down and jigged it a bit. no electronics. but the key to this bite was electronics.
for about 3 hours these guys sat there and watched us put on a clinic. they didn’t catch a single fish while my buddy and i worked these fish up and caught probably 100+ crappies.
Eventually they got sick of this and left. my only real irritation is one of the guys made a handful of phonecalls to other friends tellign them that “we are hammering them” and giving them the exact location.
Luckily we lost our ice 3 days later and i believe most have forgetten about that spot.
