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Ice Fishing Those Hidden Gems
By Cory Schmidt

Hola Compadres!

Although walleye fishing is far from over for the season, the hot early bites have begun to give way to brief, frenzied twilight bites-- happens every ice season on lakes 'round this area.

So long about this time each year, my curiosity turns toward wanderlust. As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite things is to drill holes on little obscure lakes around the region.

In most winters, it's a success to have tested twenty or so new lakes. And of those 20, you always seem to discover two or three real gems; places with largely untouched pockets of big fish. (Believe me, these lakes still exist-- places rife with 15-inch crappies, 1lb. bluegills, and 22-inch average-size walleyes).

'Course, along the way, you're also gonna trudge through miles of deep snow, slosh through untold acres of slushy marsh, drill holes straight into mud, proceed to not catch any fish, get yourself chased by mangy hound dogs, and even find you're only walking on an inch of ice over an unknown spring. You soon realize the price of real glorious angling; yet somehow, it's always fun to look back on such an experience, no matter how miserable the thing seemed at the time.

And ultimately, just how much more satisfying it is to find your own hot bites, rather than relying on yesterday’s news.

The past week or so, as we visited family in the Twin Cities for Christmas, I found, for example, that panfish gems can be found right in the middle of a million people.

Scattered throughout the Cities are these little potholes, park ponds and residential lakes. Some, like the one we fished, harbor big crappies and bluegills.

Between noon and 5pm Christmas Eve, three of us got into several roaming schools of crappies up to 17-inches and a number of bluegills approaching a pound.

To see this particular “lake” from shore is to envision a desert pond turned suburban—not exactly a wild, natural setting. A big fountain in the middle shoots towers of water thirty feet in the air during summer. The lake's edge is hemmed in by one monstrous house after another, some with foundations mere feet from the lakeshore. The only trees in evidence were a number of scrawny little yearlings, imported from the local greenhouse.

In a nutshell, the lake is little more than a bowl rimmed with docks. And although the fish were much in evidence, other anglers were not.

Even though “Lake Quest” isn’t in everybody’s blood, as it remains so strong in mine, here’s wishing you all a few new hot discoveries in 2001. It’s gonna be a good one.

-a friend called Toad

Red Pine Resort
Ice Fishing on Kabetogama.