I got to the lake an hour or so before light. I set my tip-ups in some of my favorite spots and then started jigging for the pannies. Just as soon as light appeared in the sky the bottom third of the water column filled up with fish. I checked the gain setting on the Vexlar to make sure that I was seeing things right. I started with minnows and got a couple of bumps. Waxies are easier to deal with, so I thought I'd give them a shot. I dropped a couple of the white grubs down above the cloud of fish on a Hali Jig and the top of the cloud separated off and came straight up to my bait. I pulled in a nice gill, just a little smaller than my hand. It was like this for the next few hours. It was kind of like throwing bread to ducks. They just waited there for the next morsel and then shot after it as soon as I gave it to them, trying to beat the competition to it.
I've tried all kinds of the different Berkley Alive baits and have caught a few fish here and there, but my sucess has been pretty limited with them. As a matter of fact, I had a little jar of their wax worm baits left over from creek chub fishing this summer and I just about threw it away. I stopped myself, thinking that I might as well try them for ice fishing. My only complaint about the real wax worms when I was catching fish after fish, was that I had to spend so much time re-baiting. I just couldn't keep them on the hook. Remembering the Alive waxies, I made my switch. They were awesome. The fish ate them just as readily as the real thing, and they stayed on the hook forever. I would recommend them to anybody. I'll keep them in my kit all winter. I easily caught 50 gills before the end of the day and I'm quite sure that I could have caught 100 if I would have been targeting them non-stop. They just kept coming. About a half dozen of them were huge bulls that dwarfed my hand. A great day for gills.
We have to back up to the morning to tell the pike story. After catching that muskie and all of those flatheads on live bluegills, I thought that I was crazy not to try them for pike. I set one tip-up with a gill on it and was in the process of getting the next one set just 20 yards closer to shore. I dropped the big brightly colored depth finder down to the bottom on the hook to set my depth. When I was pulling it back up, I swear that something big hit it. I felt a brief, vicious tug that left me asking myself, "What just happened?" Within a few minutes the flag popped on the tip-up that I had first set with a gill. The gill that I was using wasn't tiny, so I half wondered if he had tripped the flag. This particular tip-up was a black plastic version of the classic wooden cross type. As I walked toward it, I could see it vibrating fiercely. Something big was tearing away line. When I got to where I could see the spool, I decided that I'd better grab the line quickly because this big fish was about to spool me. It gave me several powerful runs before I finally steered its head into the hole and pulled it through. I matched my personal best with this 40-incher. I got my pictures with the camera set on a timer and sitting on top of 2 stacked 5-gallon buckets. I'm not sure what happened, but they didn't turn out very well. The lighting was bad. Oh well, enough to give you the idea.
I'm pretty sure that pike hit my depth finder just a few minutes before it chomped that gill. Never had that happen before, but this beast was cruising around that flat ready to sink its teeth into anything that moved. Pretty incredible. I'm not sure why, but the gills that I was using weren't doing real well on the hook under my tip-ups. When I took the time to watch the one set in the shallow hole, I noticed that it was actually floating right back up and laying against the bottom of the ice. It remained alive, but couldn't stay down or upright. I originally caught it out of 20+ feet of water. I wonder if the pressure change messed it up. I'll probably try to use some shallow caught gills next time.
When I returned to the warmth of my car and my house, I found myself to be exhausted. I haven't moved that much in one day in a long time, and I've been breathing nothing but stuffy inside air. It did me good to get back out in the wide open, but man did it take it out of me. Bed would have been wonderful, but my house was loud and busy when I returned home. I did my best to keep up with my kids and when I finally put them to bed I promised that I'd be more fun tomorrow. Well, it's tomorrow, so it's time to go make good on that promise.
