When Should You Stay and Grind? -vs- When Should You Drill and Find?
We drill a lot of holes!
I say that because I don’t want any of our readers to think that I am dismissing the importance of covering a lot of area with the ice auger. Many days it seems like that is what we spend over 50% of the time doing:
Drill, drill, drill!
When looking for Perch through the ice on Devils Lake, not only do you need to find Perch, you need to find the RIGHT Perch.
The biting kind.
That search makes the necessity of drilling holes in the ice imperative. We have gone over many of the techniques and strategies we use when targeting an area. What about when you have drilled, and drilled, and drilled and still haven’t found the mother load, haven’t hit that pay dirt, haven’t found your Gold Mine?
It’s Grind Time!
Some days it just isn’t happening. Some days, whether its the barometer or the weather, the fish just aren’t super aggressive. You drilled 70-100 holes and marked some fish but between the yo-yo’s and singles you just haven’t gotten into that Vexilar Christmas Tree.
You have hit 1 o’clock and only have 3-4 hours left of good light and you want to put some Perch in the bucket. This is where our record keeping on the ice comes in to play. We log our hole sets as we drill them and whenever we mark a fish, or multiples, or have a bite; we write down which hole, in which hole set, so we know exactly where to go back to when we decide that it is time to grind on some fish.
Often times it gives us a road map as to where the school is, which direction it is oriented, or which contour the most fish are on. Now it is time to go back to those ‘multiple mark’ holes and instead of fishing them for 2 minutes, we are going to grind on them for 10-20.
Sometimes those negative fish just turn on, sometimes with vigorous jigging over time, curious fish will come in. We have put together some pretty impressive days grinding on non-biting fish until they finally turned on.
The Last Two Days!
Yesterday!
Today!
Two prime examples of a 70-hole search, no jackpot, and then went back to a 1-mark hole and grinded on it. Four hours yesterday and from 7-2 today and we ended up with two pretty impressive buckets.
The Crappie Grind
The one nice thing about the Crappie’s on Devils Lake is they are a wonderful fish to sit and grind on. Even if you don’t drill onto the Diamond Mine of the year, if you mark just one, you know that there are others in the vicinity. You know that even though they may be gone one minute, they will eventually come back around. The last two days we seldom had a period of longer than 10 minutes where we didn’t have a mark on the Vexilar or a fish messing with one of the bobbers. The beauty of the blossoming Crappie population on Devils Lake is the option of searching for that ONE Crappie mark and then sitting on it, spending a day playing the cat-and-mouse game of trying to tantalize a Devils Lake Diamond to slam that Varmint.
The Walleye Grind
Due to their nature, mainly the fact that they bite in the morning and in the afternoon during the winter months and go pretty docile in the middle of the day, it is pretty futile to try to grind on Walleyes all day. Essentially there are two ways to fish Walleyes during those Golden Hour periods though. You can pepper structure with holes and then spend the 2-2 1/2 hours of the morning hopping from hole to pre-drilled hole. The other option is the Walleye Grind. Select the area of the structure you want to target, drill in 4 holes, jig in one of them and put up tip-ups or slip bobbers in the other three and hope that the eyes have been using your selected spot to feed.
The Sometimes Futile Perch Grind!
The Perch Grind is the one that can be fruitful -or- futile/boom -or- bust. We have spent many a day, grinding on yo-yo’s, only to come home with an empty bucket. Yo-yo’s, like the kids toy, are basically good for only one thing:
Wasting a lot of your time!
Perch are a species though that a grind can eventually turn into a Gold Mine Vexilar Christmas Tree with just with the passage of time. When selecting which holes to go back to, I always want to note 2 things:
- holes with multiple marks
- holes with aggressive marks
Multiples because a more ‘target rich environment’ will usually present you with the most possibilities, and Aggressive Marks because even if an aggressive mark doesn’t bite initially, that aggressiveness should turn that fish on.
I actually enjoy taking a break once in a while from the drill, drill, drill and just sit and watch 3 slip bobbers and my vexilar.
Next time you are out on the search, make sure you keep track of those holes so that you can go back to where you know there are possible targets to grind on.
Good Luck Out There!
Hold On To Your Rod!!
And…
Turn Fishing Into Catching!!
With…
DevilsLakeFishingReport!!
