Your total guide to catching splake through the ice

LOCATION

As a result of their split personality, you can find splake in the same places you’d find brookies and lakers. That makes prominent underwater points your best bets to start looking. You can fish the deep water near the tip, as you would for lake trout, or the shallow, weedy and wood-laden water near shore, where brookies are typically found during winter. You can also find splake along the breakline between those two areas.

Splake lakes are definitely good places to take advantage of using two lines, which most provinces allow during winter. I typically drill far more holes, over many more depths, when I’m ice fishing for splake than any of the other trout species. And I’m much more mobile, moving my tip-up every 15 minutes if I don’t get a bite.

It’s important to know that splake are typically stocked in deeper, less-fertile lakes, which are often already home to yellow perch and sucker populations that would otherwise outcompete brook trout. That tells you a lot about what you need when it comes to bait selection and presentation.