Fairy Lake Ice Fishing – January 21, 2012

The hut made for a great day on the ice. What a great gift this was.

The sun was shining as the truck was loaded up for a trip to Fairy Lake in Acton for a crack at some crappie fishing. After two slow weekends of fishing I was hoping to find a hot bite and my spirits were high as we drove to the lake.

It was amazing to walk out on Fairy Lake in the winter and see no snowmobiles. I don’t know why they aren’t out on the ice yet this year, but it is a nice break from the usual noise and and sometimes dangerous walking areas.

The first few holes we drilled revealed that we were finally locating fish. To be honest, over the past couple of weekends I began to wonder how well our Humminbird PiranhaMax 160 PT fish finder was working. For two straight Sundays the finder had marked almost nothing. Today, however, proved the finder was in excellent working order. From the first hole we marked fish in, to the last hole we fished, the finder reliably told us when fish were in the area, what depth they were at, and when they were moving.

This is what I looked at all day. The thick black line above bottom shows where the fish were. I never before had used a fish finder like this and it really was like a video games, watching my lure dance on the screen and then seeing the line arcing up towards it as a fish showed interest.

While we started marking fish immediately, neither of us could entice a crappie to bite. Both Darrell and I began fishing with our finesse rods and the white dropper jig tipped with a white Gulp waxie that had worked so well for us last winter. Of course, it’s always a bad idea to stay with one lure just because it worked in the past. What worked last year or yesterday, may not work today. The fish were obviously there but we needed to find a trigger to make them bite. With only one crappie pulled through the ice we started changing up our lures.

Darrell eventually ended up with a pink jig head tipped with a red Gulp angleworm and started getting bites.

Darrell with a crappie

Darrell may have been getting bites, but I was beginning to get a sense of deja-vu. I had lost a very large fish at the hole, again, and had brought nothing through the ice, again. I continued working through holes, drilling more and checking them with the sonar. Lots of fish but still no bites. So I did the only thing that made sense – I put on the same rig that Darrell was using. That worked.

The relief and excitement I felt when pulling that first crappie through the hole was amazing. I know there was a big smile on my face as I held that lovely little crappie in my hand and pulled the hook out. For the next hour or so we sat in the hut and pulled up one crappie after another. Our eyes were glued to fish finder screen, watching our lures go up and down, seeing fish raise to check out our bait, and even more fun, watching the fish we had just released swim away.

One of the fish I caught apparently liked our hut better than the water, he tried to come back up.

A nice Fairy Lake crappie.

There were a few things that were key to helping us catch fish today:

• We drilled a lot of holes,
• We only fished a hole if we marked fish,
• We moved around until we found active fish,
• We changed up our lures until we found what the fish wanted,
• We paid close attention to our fish finder and made adjustments to our presentation as needed. When we were softly jiggling our lures we would see a fish rise to check out our bait, if we decided to dead-stick we would see the fish swam away. A more aggressive jiggling action could get the fish to turn around, but they would only bite when we returned to a soft jiggling motion.

We ended up having a fantastic day. As I often do, I thanked all those wonderful crappie for biting my lure and giving me the thrill of reeling them in. There were other anglers out on the ice and I hope they had as much fun as we did.  If you are looking for some good crappie action, plan a visit to Fairy Lake.

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argosgirl

Sporadic blogger and sometimes podcaster who loves fishing, the outdoors, hanging with her animals, gardening, and reading manga.

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