Fished a small lake with very limited winter access yesterday. My eldest son was home visiting from Quebec City, and being the only one of my kids at least as die hard about ice fishing as myself, there's no one else I'd rather hit the ice with.
To make a long story short, we jigged 100 holes in 5.5 hours, managed a couple dozen jumbo perch, about 20 largemouth and 3 smallmouth bass.
More info and pics are up on my blog at
http://freshwater-phil.blogspot.com/2021/12/mixed-bag-of-bass-and-jumbo-perch-to.htmlFootnote:
Largemouth bass in this particular lake were illegally introduced at some point in time, as they are not native to that region. What typically happens in these types of lakes, is that they out compete the smallmouth bass, and end up decimating their numbers, to the point where they take over the entire lake's bass population. With very strong numbers due to almost no fishing pressure, the bass in this lake have stunted growth, to where it's common to have fish in the 12 inch range being mature enough to spawn.
As such, if I'm able to access the lake on ice, I'll make it a point to keep my legal bag limits of largemouth bass there, hoping to cull some out to make a bit more room for the quickly diminishing smallmouth bass.
As for the perch in this lake, the vast majority of them are extremely infested with worms, so for the most part, they get released, unless I manage to catch some clean ones. The worms tend to accumulate in the mouth, throat, gills, tail, and fins, so it's easy enough to spot infested fish.