I've been out ice fishing every weekend since Thanksgiving except (oddly) last weekend - - and have been hankering the entire time to try Fish Pond (a/k/a Windsor Lake) in North Adams, but there wasn't enough ice until now.
Today, I was finally able to "scratch that itch" and ice fished Fish Pond from 11 AM to 5 PM.
It was sunny with blue skies and scattered clouds, but bitterly cold (-4 when I arrived and + 1 when I left) and windy (5 to 15 mph).
There was about 5 to 7 inches of ice, covered (in most spots) by about 2 inches of snow.
Aside from 2 other fishermen (one with a cottage on shore who started around the same time I did, and another guy from VT who arrived about an hour later), I had the entire place to myself.
Although the fishing wasn't the feeding frenzy that I had hoped for, and I was disappointed not to land one of the rainbow that the DFW had stocked this past fall, I netted a pretty nice bunch of fish overall.
Despite missing a few both on my tip ups (including one that stripped my line without tripping the flag, and burying my hook in a log or something) and my jigging rod (which, frankly, I could not use to its best effect because my hands were simply too damn cold), I did OK overall, with most of the action during the last two hours
At the end of the day, my total catch (all released unharmed) were four (8" to 9") sunfish (all caught while jigging), a (10") crappie (ditto), one 13" and one 16" large mouth bass (both reeled in on tip ups) and one (17") pickerel (ditto).
