Saturday, January 24, 2009

Ice fishing weekend

Spent all of last weekend up north ice fishing by Terry's hometown. He and his dad are pretty well equiped - they have two shacks that stay on the lake all winter, one very comfortable with a heater, stove, table, and benches, the other smaller with doors in the floor for jigging. We arrived Saturday morning and put out two tip-ups each, then got settled in the smaller shack to jig for perch. Terry brought his Vexilar depth finder, which was pretty cool as you could see the fish come off the bottom to look at your jig. We caught plenty of perch, none of them real big though. When we headed out on Sunday we had about 20 of them that were 7-8". Northerns were hitting our tip-ups all weekend. We had 3 keepers at 28, 29, and 30". We caught maybe 4 or 5 that were under.

This was my first ice fishing trip with a fishing licenese, so I got to pull in my first fish, the 29" northern in the pic below.

Next weekend Jeff will be up for a seminar, and hopefully we'll get some good time jigging around Madison. Expect more ice fishing posts in the future!

Monday, January 12, 2009

Ice fishing delivery

Terry had a successful Saturday before coming down to Madison for a visit. He brought down a nice sized lake trout (23") and a northern (24"), plus about a dozen perch. We gutted the laker and plan to cook it whole sometime on the grill. The northern and the perch got filleted and will contribute to a fish fry when we get around to it. Thanks Terry!

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Update: Terry sent me this photo from his ice shack. His dad kept all but one of the northerns.
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