Chill Fishing Reports

Cody Hill

The theme from this past weekend was don’t stop trying! Just because it worked yesterday or earlier in the day doesn’t mean it will work now. 

 If you are marking fish but they are not biting, it’s time to change things up and sometimes it’s as simple as changing the type of bait on your hook. Saturday, we fished a hole near a shallow flat and the moment I dropped my spoon down the crappies were aggressive and big.  As the day went on, they became more and more selective till the pike showed up and wouldn’t leave us along.  

The joys of Livescope is that I’m able to see fish that I wouldn’t see normally and our aggressive panfish bite went cold instantly when the pike arrived.Sunday morning, I hit the same area and the fish were moving away from us just because of us walking on the ice so sadly staying in place and waiting for them to come to us had to be the game plan.  

The big crappies were very spooky and spread out.  Problem was the blue gills were very aggressive and would swim past the crappies and attack our lures. It didn’t take long to find out why and we had three pike that were chasing the fish being caught up to the bottom of the ice.  

Since the crappies were not around as much, I switched to a 5 mm tungsten with plastic and the gills were willing to bite that. After it got tougher, wax worms were needed to get any bites.  The bigger jig and plastic helped weed off the smaller panfish that were near my jig.

Sunday night we switched lakes and tried a deeper break line, and a lot of walleyes and pike were coming through, but they were practically crawling on the bottom and didn’t show too much interest in biting.  We had a few random crappies come in that were lethargic and wouldn’t bite our spoons. We tipped them with a minnow head and that helped increase bites.  

A presentation that we had luck with was dropping the spoon down past the fish and making aggressive jigging strokes till we were back even with the fish and that tended to help increase bites. Tipping our spoons with a minnow head outperformed the same lure using wax worms.

Monday the fish were one of two extremes, they either came flying in to attack our lures or they would slowly come up to the lure and nibble. We had a mixed bag in the house again, but a spoon tipped with a minnow head was the winning presentation. 

Aggressive jigging also helped increase bites like it did the night before Our best luck was on the Widow Maker Slab Seeker spoons in 3/32 oz size tipped with a minnow head this worked best for crappies and walleyes. Other spoons like Clam Pin Head worked well but weren’t the same results as the Slab Seeker spoons.  

For set lines using shiners worked best under a bobber, bigger shiners had nice mixture of walleyes, bass, and crappies. If we used small suckers on the bobber rods, they seemed to only produce smaller pike this weekend. We still have some open dates available in the next few weekends! Contact Cody today to book a trip that will make memories that will last a lifetime. 

For more information, visit www.chillguideservice.com or call (218) 443-3813.