by: Gord Pyzer photos: Bert Klassen The Icing On The Lake Hardwater season means the best angling action of the year That sonar unit you used all summer is just the trick to locate crappies under the ice If you're a Canadian angler and you don't ice-fish, you're missing out on at least one-third of the season. Indeed, where I call home, in frosty northwestern Ontario, it sometimes feels like half the year. And what a time of year it is. From roughly December until April, you have most lakes, rivers and reservoirs—even the most popular ones that are crawling with anglers in the summer—all to yourself. Better still, the fishing is hot. Fact of the matter is that the first-ice bite is often the best bite. Not just of the winter, but of the entire year.       So to help you get the most of the hardwater action this winter, let's run down how you can hook into hungry hordes of the Big Three—walleye, lake trout and crappies. Crappies You may think it strange to focus on old slab-sides first, but crappies are my favourite fish to catch through the ice. And if you can master winter crappies, you can catch everything else with fins.   Lead-headed jigs       At first ice, crappies suspend in moderately deep water from 20 to 40 feet deep. If the water is on the shallow side, you'll find the fish closely hugging bottom. If it's deeper, you'll find them riding higher up. The best way to find them is with a sonar unit. I'm still partial to using an old Lowrance flasher to light up and signal crappies, but last season, for the first time, I toted along an X-75 liquid crystal graph, and it worked like a charm.       Find a long, sloping, main lake point or a sunken reef or shoal and cut a number of holes spaced widely apart. And I mean a whole bunch of holes. Place them over the basin water right next to the underwater structure, and then keep moving from hole to hole. If you spot crappies on the screen, that's great. Fish for them. But if you do not see any crappies, you can get their attention by lightly twitching a small 1/64th-ounce to 1/8th-ounce lead-headed jig tipped with a tiny minnow or wax worm.       To properly present your bait, use four-pound-test line spooled on a small, lightweight spinning reel attached to a super-sensitive ice rod. Start jigging near the bottom. If you don't get a bite in five minutes, lift your lure 5 to 10 feet and jig some more. Strain the bottom half of the water column this way for 15 minutes, and if you don't catch a fish, move on to the next hole. Mobility is the key, folks, so keep on the move. And never forget that crappies love to swim up to hit your bait, but will rarely swim down. Walleye Compared to crappie fishing, walleye fishing is coarse and unrefined. Start by respooling your reel with six- or eight-pound mono, use the meatiest medium-action ice rod you have, and knot on a 1/8th-ounce jig or a small Rapala ice-fishing lure. Lip-hook an emerald shiner to the jig or a minnow head to the trebles of the Rap. Rapala ice jig       If you've caught some walleye in October and November, the same spots will still be hot in late December. It's a pattern that never fails. If you're starting out fresh, though, look for two things at first ice. Find the deepest water in the lake, or in a huge waterbody, the deepest pocket of water in the portion of the lake where you'll be fishing. In one lake, it could be 30 feet. In another, it could be 60 feet. In another still, it could be over 100 feet. Once you've picked the general area, look for the most classic-looking, hard-bottomed walleye structure—long sloping bouldery points, rocky shoals, and gravelly reefs and sunken humps—that lies closest to that deep water.       Now here's the key that unlocks the first-ice walleye treasure chest. Find the spot on the structure that's adjacent to the steepest drop-off. It's the opposite of what you look for in the summer when gradual breaks prevail. At first ice, and generally throughout the winter, areas near the fastest-breaking slope produce best. But don't mistake what I've just said. You don't necessarily fish on the slope. But you recognize it as the main migration route that winter walleye use to move up and down the structure, from resting to feeding areas, with the least amount of dilly-dally.       During the early morning, late afternoon and on overcast days, the top of the structure—the "restaurant," as we call it—is the best place to fish. In mid-morning and mid-afternoon, the lip or transition between the top flat and the actual drop-off is usually hot. At high noon, set up at the largest stair-step flats on the slope, or—in lakes where the basin levels out in the 25- to 40-foot range—the base of the structure. What this all means, of course, is that when you first arrive on a structure, you need to power-auger a large number of holes, well spaced out, so you can cover all the fishy alternatives. With walleye, you also want to make noise only once—when you're setting up and drilling, and then not again.       Two other important things to remember about winter walleye. First, two feet is a long way for them to be up off the bottom—they generally hug it. Second, if you can fish during sunrise or sunset, do so. Even in winter, when illumination levels below the ice are at their lowest, the period of greatest light change is the spark that kick-starts the crepuscular walleye to feed. Lake Trout   Compared to crappies and walleye, lake trout are pushovers at first ice. Picking the right spot is usually far more important than the lure you actually jig. So, how do you go about searching for the best spots? Remember the checklist for locating walleye? It's a carbon copy for lake trout. Williams Whitefish       Indeed, if there is a mistake many would-be trout anglers make at first ice, it's fishing too deep. Last year, we drilled a series of holes in 25 to 40 feet of water adjacent to a long bouldery point in one of our favourite trout lakes. One-hundred-plus feet of water wasn't far away. Had we been fishing for walleye, on a walleye lake, the spot would have been equally ideal. With one difference. Several of our holes were over the open-water basin area immediately adjacent to the point, precisely where we'd have drilled holes for crappies. That's because lakers often float in the open water and relate to the adjacent structure in much the same way that the speckled slabs do (though you'll rarely find black crappies in water deeper than 50 feet).       When we tired of battling trout up to 10 pounds, we shifted to an even shallower shoal that would have been equally enticing had there been walleye or crappies in the lake. We released two lakers there that pushed 15 pounds and snapped a line on another that was considerably bigger.       Though you fish close to the bottom for first-ice walleye or the bottom half of the water column for crappies, you need to strain the entire column for lake trout. And while walleye and crappies like you to hop your lures slowly to moderately, lakers prefer you to dance them erratically and quickly. They especially like it when you let a Power Tube jig, Rapala ice jig or Williams Whitefish spoon free fall on controlled slack. Indeed, you'll feel a majority of trout slam your lure when it's falling. That's why you always need to be in control of its movement and be ready to set the hook when you lose the sensation of weight or spot your line hanging limply in your ice hole.       So now you know what to do, just remember: winter eats up almost half the fishing season in Canada, so you can't really afford to miss out on the hardwater action. Especially since it's the best action of the year.