Big Ice Panfish

Big Ice Panfish

By Rod Woten

Finding quality panfish in any larger body of water can be a daunting task. In the winter it becomes even more challenging because the sheet of ice covering the lake prohibits you from freely casting wherever you choose in order to cover water and forces you to drill a new hole each time you want to “cast” to a different location. Fishing at first ice can be a relatively simple affair because the first places to get fishable ice are small ponds or shallow bays in larger lakes, which makes tracking down those panfish a much easier task since they are all contained in a relatively small area. Once the entire lake ices up however, the hiding place that you must sniff out increases exponentially. It can almost feel overwhelming trying to decide where to fish. Here is my technique to help me see through the chaos and systematically fish large frozen bodies of water until I find the panfish I’m after.

Know the habits of the fish you pursue
Generally speaking, most panfish, regardless of species, follow a vague pattern of movement during the three distinct periods every frozen body of water goes through: early ice, mid-season and late ice. During early ice, a good portion of the panfish population can be found in shallower water. Shallow weedy bays and shallow woody cover are both good places to start. As winter wears on, many fish will move to more main-lake types of habitat. During this mid-season period, more fish will be found in deeper water further out in the lake than they were at early ice. During late ice, most of those fish will begin to transition back towards the shallower areas they were found in during early ice. As the ice melts and runoff brings warmer water, more oxygen and microscopic bits of food into the lake, fish will be attracted to these shallow areas that contain these and warm up more quickly as they begin to come out of the mid-winter funk that they were in during the mid-season period.

Beyond all of this however, different species of fish will show an affinity for different types of habitat. Knowing the preferences of the species you want to pursue will go a long ways towards determining which areas to concentrate on in a big body of water. Do these preferences overlap amongst species sometimes? You bet they do! But there are also definitely times when they occupy distinctly different areas at any given time of the hard water season. For example, the tendency for crappies to move to the main lake basin and suspend out there during mid-season is very well known to ice anglers. This makes it very easy to narrow down where to search for crappies during the mid-season period. Sure, some crappies can be found in other areas, but a large portion of the crappie population will most likely be found out there roaming around in the basin. Even if you can pick up a few crappies in other areas, this mid-season pattern is such a predicable one that it would be a sin not to fish it.

Similarly, perch are very well known for roaming the mid-lake mud flats during mid-season. Gorging themselves on emerging mayfly nymphs, blood worms and many other creepy-crawlies that live in that muddy lake bottom found in those flats. Sometimes it may take a lot of holes to finally land on a school of them, but it’s the surest bet there is when targeting perch in a big frozen lake.

The love affair that the bluegill has with weeds is very well known as long as those weeds are green and producing oxygen, they are happy to live there, relatively sheltered from their predators. These green early-ice weeds may also be a great place to find crappie and perch during early ice. This makes any weed bed that is green and thriving a no-brainer for spots to fish when you find them on a big lake. It’s also pretty well known that if and when those weeds begin to die off, decay and consume oxygen, the bluegills make tracks for deeper water. Sometimes they can be found in the muddy areas feeding on those same bugs the perch are eating. Other times you might find them on the bottom beneath those suspending crappies. The key here is look for anyplace the bluegills will have bugs they can eat and protection, however minimal it may be, from predators.

Look at the map
It’s much easier to try and make sense of a large lake using a map than it is from the ice on that same lake. If you know what you’re looking for, you can identify all of the species-specific preferences I’ve just detailed. A map also allows you to put together a plan from the comfort of your kitchen table that you can put into action as soon as you get to the lake. This means you spend a lot less time scratching your head trying to figure out what to do next and a lot more time drilling holes and finding fish. Knowing how to identify about four major features on any lake map will go a long ways towards determining where to drill when you get to the lake.

The first feature you should be able to identify is an inside corner. These are pretty easy to identify because the contour lines bend to the right or left. Basically an inside corner is a bend that concentrates fish because it prevents them from moving forward. Essentially they “run into the wall” that makes up the other side of the inside bend and must pause or linger before changing direction and proceeding.

Break lines are another feature you should be able to identify. These are indicated by the contour lines being very close together. The closer together they are, the steeper the break is. It is at the base of these breaks that those mid-season bluegills can often be found. They are there because the bottom composition at the base of this break is the perfect composition for the burrowing insects that the bluegills love to feed on; not so hard that they can’t burrow into it, yet firm enough that it doesn’t collapse on them as they burrow.

Knowing how to identify pinch points on a map can be very useful as well. These are identified by the hourglass shape the contour lines form as they narrow and then open back up again. These areas are also called funnels because they will funnel any fish moving through right through the center of it. This is the same reason that deer hunters often look for funnel or pinch points when selecting a spot to hang their tree stand.

The last feature you should know how to identify on a lake map are called flats. These large open expanses are indicated on the map by a bulge or wide spot between adjacent contour lines. If they are shallow enough, a flat will indicate a weed bed and if it’s deeper, it may be a good mud flat that will hold perch. Often times you will find just such a bulge on either side of a break line. The upper bulge will probably be a weed bed, and the lower a mud flat. Finding the three features stacked like this is an ice angler’s dream, because it offers three different types of environments to choose from with just a short swim in one direction or the other. There’s a very good chance you will find fish in one of these stacked areas.

If you can identify these four features on a map and then find them and fish them once you get to the lake you will find fish sooner or later. So simple yet so powerful!

Dissect the lake
Finding fish under the ice of a large body of water is a difficult thing because it can be so overwhelming. There is so much water to cover that it’s hard to even pick a starting point. One very effective strategy to overcome this is to break the lake into segments. Maybe you’re only going to fish the north end? Or maybe you’re only going to fish the basin areas? However you decide to dissect the lake, the important thing is that you break it down into smaller more manageable sections. Often times, when we’re over the basin looking for roaming perch or suspended crappies, we will even break the main basin down into smaller football-field-sized segments that we can more effectively fish. If we don’t contact fish after sufficiently covering one football field, we simply move over to the next football-field segment and start the process all over again. This approach allows us to systematically eliminate non-productive areas until we contact fish.

Stay on the move
Even if you know and have mastered all of the things above, none of it will do you any good unless you’re willing to keep moving until you contact fish. It’s a game of executing each step of your plan, and moving to the next step if the previous step doesn’t pan out. This means a willingness to continually move and drill fresh holes. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of setting up and waiting for the fish to come to you. In order to effectively cover big ice you need to go out and hunt the fish…find them rather than waiting for them to wander by your location…be proactive instead of reactive. It also means traveling light and setting as few items on the ice as you can. Each item you set down is another item you have to pack up before you can move to a new location. Dave Genz, the Godfather of modern ice fishing, calls these items “anchors” and theorizes that the more “anchors” you have out, the less likely you will be to move. Staying on the move also means being willing to leave fish to find fish, especially if the fish you are catching are not the species or size that you’re after. It’s very easy to camp over the fish you are catching now, the sure thing, rather than move to a new hole where there may be no fish. If you don’t move however, the chances of catching the target species or the size desired diminish greatly.

There’s no need to let big ice intimidate you. Sure there are millions of places the fish could be hiding in all that water. If nothing else, big ice means more opportunities to contact fish and more opportunities for trophy class fish. Armed with the knowledge and skill presented above, you can attack big water with the confidence, rather than confusion.