Ice Fishing Report from Lake Erie

We had quite the warm up the last few days. Ice is still holding but it is definitely changing quickly. 

With the south winds and warm weather we have been experiencing lately Kris and I decided to give mother Erie a break and try our hand at chasing some reservoir panfish close to the house. This is something that neither of us get an opportunity to do very often so it’s a nice change of pace for us. 

We decided to head out around 2PM to the reservoir we knew would not be affected much by the winds and warm up, it turns out we were right as everywhere we checked had well over 20’’ of ice still on it. The only spots pooling water were around the edge which is to be expected. 

This particular reservoir is pretty small, spanning less than a 1/2 mile long. We both were pretty new to the area so we decided to approach it the same way we do on the lake. We started out simply by drilling some holes and looking around in a 360 degree area looking 100’ out with the Active Targets. Our first holes were definitely on the shallow end being 5-10’. We marked some smaller fish which I believe were bluegill but just not very many. We continued on working our way toward the center and discovered the bottom started to drop off nicely into 25-30’ of water. Once we hit that we were confident this is where the fish were going to be staging.

We noticed quickly that there were multiple groups of fish in the lower 5’ of the water column in most directions we looked. I was surprised at how spooky these fish were compared to Walleye that we had been targeting up to this point. It seemed every time we would drill a set of holes the fish would move roughly 20-30’ on us. As a result we started cascading holes throughout the area so that we could simply bounce between them.

I landed on a nice school of fish and decided to put on a tungsten ice fly to try first. I selected a fire tiger color and tipped it with some wax worms. I have to admit it was rather torturous waiting for those lite jigs to sink 20-30’ down. Much much slower than our walleye lures I am used to. Nevertheless, once I got the jig down to the school of fish they quickly became active racing up to it. It was apparent on the active target that there was a mixture of Blue Gill and Crappie in the school. As to be expected the Blue Gill were much more aggressive and were proving to be a challenge to get them away from the lure so the Crappie would have a chance to come in on the lure.

I found the best technique to be slowly lifting the jig about 3-6” above the school of fish and slightly jigging my rod tip. As soon as I saw them lifting up to the lure I would freeze and this is where the bite would happen. I was shocked at just how lite the bites were. We also noted that they were moving quite a bit being they were not tied to any type of structure. It seemed as soon as we would catch 1-2 fish out of the school they would scatter and regroup somewhere else. 

Kris and I spent the rest of the afternoon jumping from hole to hole chasing these schools around as they were coming and going. Most seemed to be pretty active but we were having quite a few just simply following without biting, however when we would be able to get the Blue Gill off of us and were able to drop on a Crappie most would attempt to bite. Kris and I were able to land a few really nice Crappies this afternoon, more than enough for a nice lunch in the coming days. With half a bucket full of dandies, some reaching 15” we headed in. As Kris says, any day we get to spend fishing is a good day!

See you out there!

~ Captain Matt