From Hot to Cold

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December 30th 2018

 

After several cancellations last week for ice fishing, I was finally back out today. Between bruised ribs from a bad header on the ice and crappy conditions, we all decided to postpone the outings! Today however, I had Francisco and 3 of his friends from Rio, looking for a Canadian experience. What could be better than ice fishing?

Still hurting from the recent rib beating, I requested the help of my old buddy Keith, to aid with the drilling. In fact, he managed to drill about 99% of the holes, allowing me to focus more on the rigging and instructions with the others. The K Drill and Ion X both preformed perfectly!

Although it was a beautiful morning with only a slight north wind, the air temps were in the single digits and farenheight! It was downright cold, especially if you were from Brazil and use to the heat! I felt bad for them and decided to set up the shelter so they could at least fish in the comfort of a heated tent. In fact, two of them remained there for the first couple of hours while the others braved the outdoor cold! Orientation was done from inside and several panfish were taken in the process. They now had the info needed to catch fish on their own!

I decided to set up a bunch of deadlines for bigger fish and prepped 8 polars. This would at least give them a better chance at catching pike! In between any tripped flags, they would also enjoy action from bluegills and other panfish as well, while watching their fish on flashers. It definitely makes fishing much easier!

Sometime in the afternoon after they had all landed bunches of smaller fish, we finally had a bit of action on the deadlines. Francisco was fortunate enough to bring the first pike on the ice after quite a battle. This thing may have been skinny but it was definitely long and strong! Several pics later it was returned to the water to grow!

Not long after, another flag tripped and an even bigger pike was landed by one of the others. This one was about the same length but much heavier due to the thickness. More pics and another quick release and unfortunately that was the last bite for the polars. The ban of live minnows has caused fewer fish here in Quebec and practically eliminated the walleye bite! We only had 4 flags go off and the other two were stolen dead baits. At least we scored 50% with the hits!

By mid afternoon I could see these guys were getting colder and I knew it wouldn’t be long before they called the day. By 2:00 they had seen enough and I packed up everything and readied to leave. By 2:30 we were on the road and headed home!

The group today had experienced something they had only read about before and fended quit well. Everyone had caught a good number of panfish and a couple of quality pike were brought through the ice too. The best part about today was that nobody got hurt! I had instructed Francisco to make sure that they all had ice crampons and he had done just that. Speaking from experience, don’t cheap out on foot protection! I recently purchased a good pair and paid more than I normally would have. I won’t make that mistake again! You get what you pay for!

Overall today couldn’t have gone better than it had. A good number of fish were landed by everyone and they experienced one of Canada’s favorite winter pass times. We love anything that involves ice!!