IceShanty.com's Ice Fishing Community
IceShanty Main => General Ice Fishing Chit Chat => Topic started by: fishyholes on Sep 13, 2017, 12:25 AM
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My open water confidence color is black for most species, day or night. My buddy argues the opposite for ice fishing probably due to the the size of baits we are using for panfish and his confidence in other, brighter colors. What is your take on the color black for shallow water (5-20 FOW) perch, crappie and panfish on the ice in the daytime with plastics and or jigs?
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Black seem to me to be the dominate color of bug hatches with a light cream color in second for pan fish. When trying to match the hatch and then you have the scud/fresh water shrimp colors
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try the 3mm black fiskas with glow dots.ive caught more gills on that color than any other.i stick to natural colors black,brown, red, white and gold are my top producers.
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i like black jigs, tipped with a waxie
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My go to colors are bubble gum and chartreuse.
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My best gill jig is black with a single chartreuse dot.
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My theory for open water and ice is the dirtier or tea stained the water the more dark of a jig or lure i go, the clearer the more lighter and shiny i go. That goes for light penetration as well, big snow back i go darker. Also when i am chasing blue gills or perch around, if i am fishing in 10 feet and under with clearish ice i almost always go with gold, more then 10 feet i ditch the gold.
Honestly though i almost always start off with a tungsten glow fire tiger color pattern with a maki plastic with a contrasting color to the jig specifically from clam (scented is why) and tipped with a waxy as well. If that doesn't work and they arent biting i start switching colors up and sometimes size from 1 gram up to 2 grams. I almost always use a maki since those little sh!t blue gill can strip a waxy on you and will come back for another bite 50% of the time, just gives me one more shot at them before i need to rebait, plus the action of a maki just adds one more thing to bite on.
The only time i deviate from this is for trout, shiny all the time... and I only use UV color patterns with walleyes for the most part, will see with the new glo shot spoon though on that front. But for everything else the theory seems to hold true, even with pike. This is just my experience.
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Last season we had a few days where the definite bite pattern was white/light jigs for early morning and first light, then black/dark jigs from mid-morning into the day.
For our trout fishing, a black crappie jig tipped with mealworm has been a solid standby option for many years.
YMMV