Navigating Big Ice

Navigating Big Ice

By Rod Woten

Why does it always seem that the bigger a body of water you want to fish, the harder the fish are to find? If you think about it from a statistical standpoint, the bigger lakes have more water you have to sort through in order to find fish, which means your chances are not as good as they are with a smaller body of water. Regardless of the size of the body of water, I find the 80/20 rule still applies…80% of the fish can be found in 20% of the water, it’s just that the amount of water in that 20% of a bigger body of water can be considerably more than in a smaller one. With that being said, there are certain tricks and techniques you can use to tip the odds in your favor and help make those big bodies of water seem much smaller.

Break it down
To try and fish the ENTIRE lake is an exercise in futility. Unfortunately, this is how many approach large bodies of water and they end up bewildered and frustrated. It’s a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees that leads to blindly fishing in random spots, most of which won’t hold fish and not being able to zero in on the higher percentage areas that are proven to concentrate fish. Instead of trying to figure out the entire lake, focus on a much more manageable portion of it. Concentrate on one end or the other, or maybe an arm of the lake if it’s a manageable size. Focus on a specific bay or an isolated basin area. By dialing in on a smaller, more specific area you can pay much more attention to the details within that area and those details are the things that concentrate and hold fish.

Learn to read a map
Learning to read a lake map is absolutely essential for finding fish and navigating bigger lakes. Not only will it simplify your efforts to sub-divide the lake into smaller more manageable sections, but it will help you identify some of those smaller details. Using the contour lines on the map, look for features that will concentrate fish. One of these details that is very easy to pick out once you look at the contours is a funnel, neckdown or pinch-point. Just like a deer hunter looks for pinch-points because they “squeeze” the deer into a predictable travel pattern, an ice angler should look for these in lakes contours for the same exact reasons. The tell-tale hourglass shape of a funnel makes it something that even someone just learning to read lake maps can easily pick out. Inside corners are another feature that is not extremely difficult to find in the contours of a lake map. These right angle bends in the contour lines concentrate fish because the opposing side of the corner presents a barrier to the fish as they travel into it and forces them to pause and decide if they want to turn and continue following that contour, go back the way they came, or simply spend some time there with the other fish who are pondering the same exact questions. The only way to get comfortable with finding these features and any others that hold concentrations of fish is to practice, practice, practice. Linking the places that you find while on the ice that concentrate fish and reconciling these with what the contour map shows allows you to build a data file, of sorts, of the kinds of contour features you find the most fish in, on or around.

Power Up
Navigating big ice also means getting mechanized. There’s a reason so many anglers fish from a boat during the open season. Most of the time, fishing from a boat is considerably more efficient than fishing from the shore. A boat allows you to go right to the fish and quickly move from one location to the other. If ice fishing on foot is the cold weather equivalent of fishing from shore during the open water months, it follows that fishing with some sort of mechanized transportation on the ice is equivalent to fishing from a boat on the open water. That “mechanized” transportation can take many forms. Obviously the most common modes are ATVs and snowmobiles, but other options I’ve seen are golf carts, lawn tractors, bicycles, skis, and ice skates, just to name a few. Whatever form they take, the important thing is that they allow you to make much bigger moves than you can on foot and allow you to cover larger expanses of ice in a much shorter time.

Keep Moving
Mobility is always important in ice fishing, but it is even more important on big ice. There will be a LOT of ice to cover and if you spend an hour in one hole trying to get the neutral or negative fish down there finally bite, you’ve just wasted a whole hour’s worth of other ice areas you could be covering. Instead of spending so much time on those negative fish, strive to find the fish elsewhere under that big sheet of ice that are aggressive and on the feed. Don’t spend a lot of time fishing non-productive water, because your goal is to eliminate as much non-productive water as possible and find the productive water. If you don’t have fish under you within a few minutes, then move on to the next hole. If all that you’re pulling out of the hole you’re fishing is 4-inch fish, then keep moving until you find the hole that has the bigger fish you’re looking for.

Teamwork
Working as a team is a great way to help make that big ice seem smaller. One classic approach is to have one person drilling a pattern of holes while another person follows up, checking and quickly fishing the holes. This eliminates all the time it takes for one person to transition back and forth between drilling and checking/fishing. Once a concentration of fish is located, the driller can put down the auger and join the trailing angler in fishing. Once that pod of fish moves on, or becomes negative, the entire process can be repeated. It’s amazing how much ice a 2-person team of anglers can cover in a short amount of time, and that only increases as you add more teams of anglers all working together. This tactic is especially effective when searching for perch, which like to roam expansive mid-lake mud flats in during mid-winter, and crappies who like to suspend over mid-lake basin areas during the same time periods. Sometimes the expanses of ice these fish can be found under are massive and it definitely takes teamwork to find them but the rewards can be well worth the effort when you find a huge school of feeding perch or crappies.

Safety First
Big ice can also be dangerous ice. Pressure ridges, open spots from waterfowl, cracks, whiteouts…these are just a few of the things that big ice seems to have no shortage of. When you’re on big ice, you need to keep your head on a swivel at all times and be cognizant of changing ice conditions. Pressure ridges are one of the biggest dangers of big ice, so approach them with caution. Try not to cross them if you don’t have to. Travel along the ridge at a safe distance until you can find a safe place to cross it. If you must cross the main part of a pressure ridge, check it thoroughly with your spud bar to be absolutely sure it will support your weight before proceeding. As you encounter and safely navigate dangerous areas of big ice, be sure to keep track of them on your GPS so that you can safely navigate back to land if you’re out after dark or get caught in whiteout conditions. It’s also a good practice to have your GPS leave a trail of digital “bread crumbs”, so that there is no question which way to retreat if ice conditions change ahead of you, or you encounter low visibility conditions like fog, whiteout or nightfall.

During late ice avoid any areas where tributaries might empty into the large body of water you’re on. As runoff increases with the approach of spring, these areas will always be some of the first to start losing their ice. The same can be said for points or shallow rock reef or gravel areas. The warmth from the sun penetrating the ice in these areas is captured by the gravel and rocks and those areas warm very quickly with just the slightest increase in ambient air temperature. Big ice also requires that you always go prepared. Be sure to bring rope…the more the better. Several long coils of rope can come in handy for pulling snowmobiles out of slush pockets or extracting an ATV when the front wheels punch through a pressure ridge or crack. Tow straps are also a good idea. Everyone should bring a shovel for digging out stuck machines and a spud bar for checking ice or chipping ice away from anything that might get frozen down.

Getting around on big ice and tracking down fish certainly has its challenges. It requires more forethought then when navigating the ice on smaller bodies of water. It requires a bit more preparation and more concentration and awareness when actually out there. Yes, there can certainly be more risks involved but the opportunity to find large schools of un-disturbed fish…fish that have never even seen a jig…and the opportunity to catch a BIG fish of any species that swims under that big ice can make all those risks well worth it.