New to Brushy

[frozen eyelet]

Would like to head over to brushy and check this lake out, crazy deep and contours galore.
It seems a lot of people hit north end, also see interesting areas elsewhere.
Any tips on depth to fish for perch, walleye would be appreciated!
Will share info/coordinates of any success with anyone who gets me going in right direction

[squ1rr31_]

Welcome, if you go to the top right of the page you can actually type in the lake and narrow things down to Iowa and you will find a ton of information on Brushy from the past.

[frozen eyelet]

Thanks!  Will do

[frozen eyelet]

Made it to brushy. Mainly used my Garmin Active Captain and tried to work the contours.
In a few areas, there was a big differnce in water depth according to where my GPS location was on the map. Seemed like the water was 10' deepper than should have been.
We could only acccess the north 1/3 with ice conditions and open water. Open water on the rest of the ramps.  Caught alot of small perch with an occasional 9", a few small walleye and 2 crappie near the ramp as we came back just at sunset.

The submerged bridges are cool to see with the livescope as well as the old roads with the surrounding ditches.  Its amazing how many trees are below the waterline that a person doesnt see on that lake.

If anyone headed out in next couple of days be careful.  We had 5 inches of ice but the color was changing and it wasn't hard to drill it.  By the time we loaded out, the west half of the double ramp was starting to break up and deteriorate.  The warm weather may put and end  to being on that lake soon.

[Short_Rod]

Glad to hear you could at least get on the ice. Thats progress I suppose. How well did the live scope do at differentiating fish from tree branches? Id imagine you could scan around and find the trees with fish loaded on them. But maybe that's not reality.

I haven't really found any magic depths on Brushy. My success has always been finding areas with multiple forms of structure coming together like a hump with a rock pile and trees, or something like that.   

[frozen eyelet]

I need a couple more trips up with good ice to get to scan places that I wasn't comfortable going to.
I really didnt see alot of suspended fish until we came back to the ramp that evening.  The 2 fish we saw suspended we caught and released back for you guys to get later on.

My lack of screen time still has me trying to figure out how to define the perch from the bottom.  When we were at Waubay a few weeks ago I had no issues seeing the walleye coming in.  Its just the smaller fish.

I wanted to get out into some deeper basins and see if we could find schools of crappie.  There was too much open water and the last thing I want to do is drop this unit into the bottom of any lake lol.

I went to an area that Active Captain Mapping claimed to have a rock pile but didn't locate.  Didn't spend much time, drilled around 4-5 holes and couldn't locate so we headed back towards the ramp and set up with the rest of the group. 

The middle and dam area of the lake looks as if they coud have some great opportunity, but that wasn't an option with ice conditions.

[Bryfish84]

I heard a guy fell through near the north ramp on the 2nd.

[Ice_Fly_Guy]

I heard a guy fell through near the north ramp on the 2nd.

Yes, I got a DNR email regarding that.

[frozen eyelet]

We were hoping that we could find some good fish as we were considering trying it for a weekend. We would like to spend 3 days on MLK weekend fishing somewhere other than Clear Lake.
Last year we traveled up to Clear Lake and also fished surrounding lakes.  Crystal Lake is one I want to go back and try.  It has so many contours after they dredgded it and loos really promising.  Rice was slow also but we fished a weekend where the barometric pressure was bad and it was COLD!