THE DAY THE FISH GOT AWAY - Part two

Author's note: This is part two of a blog that details one recent day of ice fishing on Little Bay de Noc in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The final installment will be posted tomorrow evening.


We set up the shanty directly at the point where the drop-off leveled out onto the flat. I baited a double-hook minnow rig with one flashy three-inch shiner at one foot off bottom and another at three feet up. That rod had a spring-steel strike indicator on the tip and I set it in a holder so it could work itself while a readied a second rig for perch. This one had a bright gold spoon as an attractor, a two-inch clear leader off the spoon, and a bright orange, needle-sharp plain hook on the end of the leader. It was baited with a live wiggler and lowered down so it rested just above the boulders.

I settled in to work the perch rig by lightly jigging it, while the walleye rig worked itself. The two shiner minnows swam around, keeping the strike indicator dancing lightly. After a while, the spring steel on the tip of the double-hook rig bent downward very slowly, which told me a fish was mouthing the bait. I rested the perch rig on the edge of the seat and took the other rod in hand. I lowered the rod tip for a few seconds to let the fish get the minnow fully, then I raised the rod tip until I started to feel the weight of the fish.

I was sure I’d set the hook into a walleye, but when I snapped the rod upward, the perch rod shot downward, falling to the floor. I grabbed for it while continuing to raise the other rod. Almost instantly I realized that whatever took the shiner minnow had crossed the line on the wiggler rig. The two were tangled! I tried to open the bail on the second rod so I would have a chance to land the other fish, but it just didn’t work. Whatever hit the shiner rig was gone and that was that!

While this was going on, Duane tried to quickly reel in his lines, and possibly take the perch rig from my side of the shanty, but it all happened quickly and we did not salvage anything from the brief flurry of excitement.

After a couple hours or so we had no more action on that spot, so we moved up to the weed edge on top of the underwater slope. There we could easily see the bottom in ten feet of water and we sight-fished small ice lures tipped with wigglers for perch, but had absolutely no action.

O.K., if nothing was going on shallow or at the base of the drop-off, we decided to head out to fifty feet of water east of the place we started and try for bigger perch from the depths. This was also the type of place whitefish sometimes hold in, so I put a simple split-shot and plain hook rig down, with the shot laying on bottom and the minnow swimming around it. This is generally the way whitefish like their bait presented.

Here again, we spent time trying to make something happen. I did see one fish approach on the screen of my locator and it may have picked up the minnow – the signal produced by my bait and that of the fish merged on the screen – but I did not get a good hookset. Too much stretch in fifty feet of four-pound test monofilament I guess. I also worked a deep-water perch rig baited with a wiggler here, but nothing bit.

We moved a few hundred yards at a time, working our way toward south toward the mouth of the Escanaba River, looking for roaming bands of perch, but it seemed that when we zigged, they zagged, when we hopped, they skipped. In the end our paths just didn’t cross. Arriving at the river mouth, we set up well out into the bay, because the constant flow of the river itself makes the ice there unstable. The mouth of the river forms a kind of broad delta that ranges from five to fourteen feet deep, then drops into twenty-six feet well out into the bay. That’s where we made a final attempt to salvage the day.

End of part two - check in tomorrow evening for part three.

Copyright Ray Hansen, 2009