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!

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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Finally identified, Takifugu niphobles (grass puffer)

I got bored at work today and decided to figure out what species of puffer I caught last August in Japan, or die trying. It actually wasn't that difficult, even though I had spent considerable time trying to identify it when I first got back to the states.

Image from fishbase.



Picture of me holding two of the puffers from Shiraishi Island, Japan.

Goals for 2009

The name of the game for 2009 will be to add more species to the list of fish I've caught. In the past 6 months I've caught 18 distinct species (see my profile) plus several hybrid sunfish that I'm not very good at identifying yet. Counting previous years, I've also caught channel catfish, as well as several fish in the Florida Keys back when I was in high school. The only one I remember for sure was mahi mahi, but I can't remember if I was the one to actually reel any of them in, so I won't count it.

http://www.wiscfish.org/fishid/wFrmWisconsinFishList.aspx

There's a huge list of fish native to Wisconsin that I've never caught. This should make my task of adding to my species count easy enough. My challenge will be to get out of my comfort zone of going to the usual spots in Madison, and also learn to fish with methods that I'm not currently familiar with.

1. Catch 2 or 3 species of catfish.
- should be in any of the local lakes, but probably go to the Wisconsin river

2. Catch at least 1 species of carp.
- seen them feeding regularly in Lake Monona, need to find a good bait

3. Catch a few minnow, sucker, and darter species.
- get some lighter tackle and find smaller streams outside of Madison

4. Catch a gar.
- Jeff says he's seen them at the warm water discharge from the power plant on Lake Monona, verify this and try to catch one!

5. Catch a musky.
- any of the lakes or channels in Madison should be ok, fish the same way as for northerns

6. Catch and identify a new kind of sunfish.
- first of all make sure I can identify a longear sunfish, warmouth, and various hybrids etc.

7. Catch a lake trout (ice fishing).
- my buddy has an ice shack on a lake about an hour north of Madison, we caught a big one last winter but I didn't have a fishing license and I didn't really help at all

8. Catch another kind of trout in a stream.
- a few people I know have experience fishing for trout in streams, ask them for suggestions

Maybe I should start fishing in my aquarium

The pumpkinseed and the sucker (under the rock).



The two smallies, aka the eating and pooping machines.