The rest of the ice fishing story

[Nate Herman]

After we took the kids back inside to their mothers and their eventual naptimes, I headed back out with my mom and dad to try and figure out how to fill up a 5 gallon bucket full of them pesky little bluegills. The bluegill were hugging tight to the bottom (according to my good friend Vexilar) and werent moving around or interested in eating much. Typically when we dont mark fish up in the water column it means they arent moving around much. Most of the time when I can spot a fish a few feet off the bottom, I can catch it! Not so with bottom hugging fish. Your best bet to catch a mess of bottom huggers is to drill as close to structure as possible and move to a new hole every few minutes to grab the most active fish. Basically if the fish arent moving, you need to. Since we were marking quite a few fish in our spot, I knew if we could stick it out till about 3:30 on a day like yesterday that the bite would pick up real strong for about an hour or so before sunset. The dilemma we faced was that there were just too many good college basketball games on this saturday afternoon, and I didnt feel like moving around at all and the wind just kept on picking up as the afternoon progressed. Basically what I am getting at is that I didnt dress warm enough and was too lazy. While we didnt fill up the 5 gallon bucket, we did manage enough for a nice meal or two.




Mom will kill me if she sees these pics online, but she was sporting some new camo overalls and highly insulated rubber boots.


About 2 pm and the geese got up out of the field and wanted to come get a drink of water at our aerator. There were about 1500 geese sitting in our corn field all day long.



They had to go find somewhere else to drink, they didnt want to land with us being on the other side of the pond. Above is a pic of the hole of water our aerator leaves open. I wait until the ice forms thick and then turn on the aerator so it doesnt mess up the safety of our ice fishing on the other side of the pond.