Nebraska First Ice Bluegills and Bass

Saturday was my first and only day on the ice for 2006 thus far. With last year being the shortest ice fishing season I can ever remember (2 weeks) I sure was happy to see our lakes icing up in the first week in December this year. With warmer temperatures last week my cousin Pete and I decided that a smaller lake would be our best bet in finding some safe ice. We found 5 inches at our favorite private farm pond. The ice looked decent when we arrived but with temperatures expected to top out at 60 degrees we knew our time on the ice would be limited. It didn’t take us long to get into some fish.

It’s been our expierence with this lake that fish are extreamly spooky. We are usually the only guys who ice fish this pond and the fish seem to disappear when you start drilling holes. So we’ve come up with plan of drilling nearly all of the holes you need for the day when we get there. We stuck with an area that has been good for us in years past and started drilling. Afer looking around with the underwater camera I found some areas of thicker weeds and some where the weeds were much more sparse. These sparse areas next to the heavier cover were our most productive areas. Using a pink and silver flutter bug jig it didn’t take long to land a few small bluegills and a decent largemouth. It took an hour or so to find the bigger 8 to 9 inch gills but we found them. They were in the same type of area but were a little more picky with how you jigged. A good fish finder and a good sensitive rod were key to getting numbers of the bigger gills. I was using my new St. Croix Legend Series with the Super Finesse Strike Indicator Spring. What a great addition to my ice fishing gear. I can only imagine how much more productive I’ll be on the pan fish using this rod this season.

We were forced to finish up the day around 2:00 because of deteriorating ice conditions. We wound up catching 5 decent bass and well over 100 bluegill. We took home a bucket of 25 or so bluegills for some good old bluegill sandwiches.

With the condition of the ice when we left I’m hoping our warmer weather holds until the ice is gone. It’s been my expierence that starting over with some new ice will be better in the long run. On average in Nebraska January and Febuary are our coldest months. Let’s all hope for a cold spell to hit us by Christmas so we can get out and use all of the new ice fishing gear we’re getting for Christmas.

Be sure to be safe on the ice this year and remember to not fish alone until there is a good 4+ inches of ice.