Ice-fishing Friday: 7 expert tactics for catching fish on busy, pressured lakes

Interest in ice fishing is skyrocketing these days as more and more anglers hit the hardwater in pursuit of walleye, trout, yellow perch, black crappies, whitefish, ciscoes and northern pike. Case in point: Twenty years ago, more walleye were caught during the May long weekend on my home waters, northwestern Ontario’s Lake of the Woods, than during the entire winter season. That’s not the case now, however. These days, multi-lane ice roads and groomed snowmobile trails criss-cross the giant body of water, with countless ice-fishing shelters—both permanent and portable—sticking out like dandelions in the green grass of spring.

Then there’s nearby Lake Winnipeg to the west, where just 25 years ago we rarely saw other anglers out on the ice. Now you can find yourself in bumper-to-bumper traffic across the frozen south end of the lake, stuck in an endless string of red tail lights as the sun creeps up over the horizon. There are now so many ice anglers on Lake Winnipeg, in fact, that visiting sticks from nearby North Dakota joke that it’s their largest city during the winter. And on it goes across the country, with droves of eager anglers hitting the hardwater.

To cope with fishing pressure during the open-water season, anglers have long developed complex systems and procedures to quickly find and catch more and bigger fish. Ice anglers, on the other hand, have only recently started looking for ways to get an edge on the competition. To help you speed up the process, here are my magnificent seven tactics for staying ahead of the crowd and taking your ice-fishing game to the next level.