Sardines Again?

Fished with John this afternoon. Temperature was in lower 30's with lots of sunshine. The wind was out of the west 15 knots, but because we fished in the canals, it did not affect us.

Planned on fishing the Salt River area but I had bad reports from Doug Sowa, who was out there this morning, and John had bad reports from his friends at work who were fishing Selfridge. We drove by Campau Bay where there were only around a dozen people fishing in the middle of the bay. There didn't seem to be any activity when I checked it out through the binoculars. No one was fishing by the flagpole at Candles, which is where we usually fish. Drove by one of the canals we fish on South River Road and it was pretty crowded so we stopped to see what was going on. Talked to a few guys who were catching some fish, so we decided to spend the afternoon here. The ice here was 14 inches thick. You could barely see the bait on the bottom or the fish hitting it.

Today's bait was minnows, waxworms, spikes, wigglers and mousies. Every bait of choice for ice fishing. Caught a couple of perch right off the get-go and thought we had hit into a lucky spot. Things came to a quick stop so John decided to experiment again with his can of sardines. His fishing pole stunk, his hands stunk, the shanty stunk, and when he went for the potato chips, I grabbed them first. After twenty minutes of smelling sardines we moved the shanty twenty feet away so we wouldn't have a smelly, oily hole in the shanty.

Caught quite a few small fish, but we only had five keepers between 7 & 8 inches. We gave them to a person we met on the ice today so he would have enough for a fish dinner tonight.

Minnows seemed to work the best today even though we didn't catch very many fish.

Next Planned Trip: Next weekend with Joe