PANFISH APLENTY
Want to catch more wintertime perch and crappies? Hit the ice running with these expert tips and tactics
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#2 HIT THE BOTTOM
As for the flat ho-hum basin bottom, it’s often glossed over by too many winter anglers. What’s so special about a muddy bottom, right? In fact, the soft silt and clay basin offers the fish a cornucopia of mouthwatering morsels, including hundreds of plump, juicy mayfly nymphs per square metre, as well as thousands of bloodworms and other aquatic invertebrates. When I find a school of plate-shaped crappies or fat jumbo perch energetically plucking these offerings out of the mud, I think of chickens joyfully gobbling up grasshoppers, insects and seeds in a barnyard.
Often, there’s so much food buried in the ooze that the fish will spread out randomly in ones and twos or roam the flats in concentrated clusters. The different possibilities might make you wonder whether you should sit and wait for a wave of fish to pass beneath your hole, or drill enough holes in the ice that it resembles Swiss cheese, then hop between them. I rely on my sonar unit to tell me what to do.
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BONUS TIP: FIRST STRIKE
The best spots to begin fishing for perch and crappies at first ice are the ones where you left them biting in the fall. Turnover is a protracted period of fish consolidation that doesn’t happen in just a day or two, or even in a couple of weeks. In fact, it peaks under the ice as the fish pile onto the key structures and basin flats. So, wherever you left the fish biting in the fall, that’s where you’re going to catch them at first ice.
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