The Ice Itself!
Here is the good news of this post. It is solid, 18-24 inches in almost all areas and very stable. I haven’t drilled into any ‘danger areas’ lately and have seen a lot of good 20-22 inch ice where have been the last few days. The ice sheet, aside from a few areas of slush where there has been a lot of drilling activity, is in great shape.
It is what is on top that we need to talk about.
The Issue!
SNOW!
And lots of it!! This is one of those years where we have had repeated snows and wind creating quite the issue out there with wheeled travel. While it is not impossible to get around with a truck with tires, it is troublesome and you will do a fair amount of shoveling, especially if it is cloudy or there is reduced visibility and you cannot see the drifts. Some of those drifts out there are deep, 3-4 feet in areas. Tracked travel is absolutely the recommended way to go out there.
If tracks aren’t an option then you need to think about targeting areas of the lake that have plowed trails, and to our knowledg there are 3 of them:
- Creel Bay thanks to Woodland Resort
- Swanson’s Point/Casino area thanks to Spirit Lake Resort and Casino
- East Bay/Black Tiger Bay thanks to EastBay Campground
If wheeled travel is the only way you have to get out there, then we definitely recommend one of these three areas. We also urge you to stop in and patronize those 3 places to thank them for plowing trails and making fishing still possible.
How’s The Bite, You Ask??
Well, the one good thing I can say is…
IT WAS REALLY GOOD!!
Things have taken a turn for the worse, for us anyway. Still seeing fish and still catching a few but the torrid, active Perch we were seeing 2 weeks ago have gone very negative. We are hearing the same from a lot of other guys that are out there every day as well. It is not unusual for this to happen when we get this much snow on the ice and things will get better, it is just a little mid-season funk that our fish always seem to go through and they always seem to come out of it as their biological clocks start ticking.
There are those blow hard’s out there that will tell you that they…
Hammer them every day!!
I’m sorry, it just doesn’t happen that way. No one hammers them every day!! There will be bites that pop up and those fish will be active for a few days and then they too will go negative for a stretch. We see this happen all too often and it just seems like it is a trend with the fish, especially the Perch on Devils Lake.
We were on the same little pod of fish the last two days and we saw it occur right before our eyes. Fired up, schools turned into docile, bottom hugging singles in the span of 72 hours. The only thing we could get a bite out of our fish today with, was the smallest Tungsten and a full minnow. Wouldn’t even come up on a spoon, they just shimmered on the bottom on a Tungsten and spikes, a few would hit the full minnow.
Things will turn around, hopefully soon, and the good news is we don’t know the meaning of the word quit. We will keep plugging away, looking for that Vexilar Christmas Tree, as soon as we find it we will bring it to you here.
Good Luck out there!
