Ice and snow conditions 3-11-2012 Nestor Falls, Muskie Bay Resort

Winter has been slow this season; could the gas prices be affecting your ice fishing trip? Or perhaps the weather; it has been extremely warm in many places this winter and you are not even thinking about ice fishing.

Well we are still in ice fishing mode, winter has been here for a while and it looks like it will be staying for a while. Fishing was great for lake trout fishing in January; but it has been tough in February; crappie fishing has been good in February, I am looking forward to March with its warm weather the fish getting active for spring.

See you on the ice


Paul Trinkner
www.muskiebayresort.com
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877-228-2076

I came across this article written recently about trout fishing and thought it could be helpful. It was on the "WFN" Blog Gord Pyzer.

Perch Connection
Posted On March 10, 2012
Can you believe the weather outside?

It is sunny and warm, there is a mile high blue sky and the long range weather forecast says it going to stay like this for the rest of March - with temperatures miles above normal - whatever normal is any more.
It is going to make this year's "last ice bite" even better than it normally is.

That is one of the things I was talking about last weekend when I was presenting fishing seminars over at the Mid Canada Boat Show in Winnipeg. The Show, by the way, was fabulous with so many nice folks dropping by to say, "hi", and talk about what the next few weeks will likely have in store for us.


The Mega-Tank, where I was doing the seminars, was filled with giant walleyes that a group of local anglers had caught ice fishing the day before on nearby Lake Winnipeg. Many of the big 'eyes swimming in the tank were double digit 10-, 11- and 12 pound trophies.

So cool!

And watching how the fish reacted - or didn't react in some cases - to the various lures I was demonstrating raised an interesting question about "matching the hatch" and how forage often influences the bite.

Indeed, when Jason Gauthier, who is the best seminar emcee in the business, walked among the audience during one particular question and answer session, one keen angler said he had noticed, while watching a segment of the In-Fisherman Ice Guide television show that aired recently, that I was using a white tube jig to catch big lake trout, but that I had dyed the tips of the tentacles chartreuse. He wanted to know why I had done this. (Man, I still can't believe he picked up on that little secret!)



Anyway, it was a great question and the reason is, that for much of the year, especially the summer, lake trout are confined to the deep water zones of most lakes, given their preference for water temperatures ranging between about 48 F and 52 F. Their favourite ciscoe, whitefish and smelt forage base does exactly the same thing.

But, in the winter, when the entire lake is cold and within the thermal tolerances of trout, it is a totally different scenario. Indeed, while many winter trout anglers remain single-mindedly focused on fishing in deep water, I often find lake trout foraging in places more suited to walleye. Especially, if there is an abundance of shallow structure and cover and, thus, shallow water forage – particularly yellow perch – that remain out of the reach of the trout in the summer.

I find the best locations are often large flats stretching between and connecting a series of islands. The shallow shelves typically average about 30- to 40-feet deep and the trout devour perch-painted lures.

As a matter of fact, I'll sometimes clean a small trout for shorelunch and invariably I'll find yellow perch in its stomach.

I believe a large part of the reason is that perch in the winter time represent an easy, abundant, energy-efficient target. Unlike the more mobile, harder-to-chase-down, cold-water pelagic species, the sluggish perch are sitting ducks. A trout can cruise over a flat or hard bottomed shallow structure and literally cherry-pick them off the bottom at will.

It may even be that yellow perch are not the preferred food of winter lake trout – think hamburger instead of rib-eye – but they’re so plentiful, so accessible and so effortless to catch that the trout specifically target them.

Whatever the reason, for the past decade or so, I've been (secretly until now) taking a four-inch long white tube jig that perfectly matches the size, shape, colour and profile of a shiner, smelt or whitefish and dipping the ends of the tentacles into chartreuse dye - so the bait also resembles a yellow perch.

To me, the lure represents the best of all possible worlds - and the way the lake trout hit it - they seem to think so, too!