Wanted to take a moment to share how I locate target fish by ice trolling when I first hit the ice, in this case we find suspended crappie.
Arriving at the lake around 1 P.M. the good early morning bite is long over, and we're right in the middle of the day. Using the Navionics App for Android ($10), I locate a promising looking flat leading to a submerged point, with deeper water nearby. Fish could still be cruising the flats, hanging somewhere off the point, or out in deeper water. Or it could be a bust and I need to move on and start the process all over! This is what "Ice Trolling" is all about, finding and locating active feeding fish as quick as possible.
With the Navionics app running, I first walk out a line from the flat down the nose of the submerged point giving me a nice trail to come back over with the Strike-Lite II auger. The line of
Red X's are my first "troll" and this is an actual screen shot of the Navionics mobile app
(I added the X's for the post).
After drilling out a series of holes, sometimes a dozen at a time, I then go back and with the Vexilar FL-20 and starting at the shallow end on the flat begin to fish. I only spend a minute or so at each hole. Dropping a heavy flashy jig down I pound the bottom and lift a few inches to see if I get any marks on the flasher. I'll fish it up through the water column and then let it fall back to the bottom raising a cloud of sediment. Fish it back up and if I'm marking nothing, I'll move to the next hole, rinse, repeat. This particular day the first troll showed nothing. On to the next troll...
The
Blue X's are the start of my second "troll". Beginning near the top of the flat/point I first walk out a line following the contour lines of the mobile app, and then drill a line of holes following the saddle to deeper water. Using the same technique, fish out this line of holes the same way. All we're looking for is some activity down there and then we can fine tune our presentation to hook'em up! But again, not much going on, so on to the next "troll"...
I then drill a series of boxes out to each side of the saddle, the
Pink X's still searching for either suspended fish, or possibly walleye hugging the bottom in deeper waters. It is in one of the pink holes we finally see this! Suspended fish!
For those of you who may not use a flasher, I have the Vexilar FL-20 set to a depth of 60' (since I'm not fishing over a 60' depth). The mark at the top of the flasher is the top of the ice, the mark to the left of the flasher is the bottom of the lake at right about 48' foot of water. And all those fantastic marks in the middle are crappie suspended between 20' and 30' foot over 48' foot of water that we located with the use of the Navionics mobile app, ice trolling and the Vex FL-20.
Had we not located these fish in the pink holes, we would of continued drilling out to the side into deeper water until we had covered the area thoroughly. Once we covered the water and structure here and found nothing, we would search out other points or structure in the lake and do the same thing. We happened to locate the fish this day in under an hour of ice trolling.
Now it's time to settle in and start taking advantage of this find!
And here is the reward for our little bit of preparation, scouting out a likely looking submerged point, finding nothing, drilling off to deeper water and to the sides of the saddle in order to locate the fish. Without the electronics we very well could have been sitting over a dry hole for quite some time not even getting a light bite. We would tell all our friends the fish were tight lipped or not even around anymore. But with the use of a good topo app, an efficient, light and easy to use power auger, and quality flashers, with a bit of work we can put decent fish on the ice. This crappie is laying next to an 8" auger hole, and his buddies are 20' below us ready to join him!
Hope this helps you put more crappie and other species into your bucket! If you have any questions fire away!
Tight lines to all Ice Shanty members!
- wyoutdoors
