Harrier Lake - First Weekend of March

I usually fish with several members of DuPage Angler on any given weekend.  This weekend's fishing was discussed on a Facebook group starting last Monday.  All the active ice anglers have a Facebook group and we talk fishing, ice fishing, more fishing, and probably something about fishing too.  This week we decided by committee that we would be fishing Harrier Lake in the DuPage County Forest Preserve District.

I fished Harrier earlier this ice season.  I didn't have very good luck at all so I was a bit uneasy going back.  I only caught two bluegills last time I was there and I hadn't read many reports from the lake this season. Still a bunch of my fellow DA Ice-Heads want to go, I go.

Left to Right: SteeliePete, JC1Crappies, CrankinKing

Left to Right: BrimReaper, SteeliePete

I found some of my DA friends quickly enough as they were the large group on the ice as well as the only ones on the ice.   There were already holes drilled and fishing happening but very few fish had been caught.  I put the battery on my ION auger and started to make swiss cheese of the ice. drilled a tennis court sized grid of holes through 20+ inches of ice.  My flasher showed me my holes were above 10-15 feet of water but there wasn't much activity at all on the flasher's dial.  

I saw a concrete drain on the shore and drilled holes toward it hoping to find a hole, edge, weed edge, or something that could hold fish.  I flashed the holes and stopped when I found what I thought was an 11 foot deep spot with a foot and a half of weed growth on the bottom.  The thing was these weeds were moving!

I grabbed the custom ultra-light I made last season.  It had an orange colored Fiskas tungsten jig tied on the 2# test ice line.  Two red and two natural colored spikes were impaled on the jig's hook before it was dropped down to the moving "bottom".  This "bottom" came up to take a look at my jig!

That "bottom" was a perch!  Not much of a perch but it was a species I don't usually catch so I was excited to see it come up for a picture.  That and I beat the skunk with this perch so the pressure to catch fish was officially off!  I wonder if....

Yup!  More "bottom" perch bit my jig!

This fish hit my dead-stick rod.  It's a light-power rod I made that I set up with a slip-float, a split-shot, and a pink Custom Jigs and Spins Diamond Jig.  I managed to rig a dead-stick up between the perch I was catching and releasing. 

This was the chunkiest of the perch I'd catch today.  In all I caught 8-10 perch with no other species mixed in.  Today was totally a perch day.  I enjoyed that!  I enjoyed catching a species I don't see often in my area of northern Illinois.  I enjoyed besting my personal best perch with the one in the gloved-photo above.  (Still not huge but better than my first perch ever)

More than 20" of ice in March.  I'm wondering if we'll be able to fish on top of the water up to May?  

May-be

Snowy Saturday Crappies

I was up late Friday night so I didn't want to be up at the crack of dawn to go fishing on Saturday. The weather was supposed to be cold until early afternoon when we could expect warmer temperatures in the 20s and a forecasted 1-4 inches of snow. I packed up slowly and took my time getting to the lake I was planning on fishing today.  Maybe I took a little too much time.

I hadn't been parked long before my windshield was completely covered by big, fluffy snowflakes. I knew the slog from my car to the area I knew to be productive would be hindered by the snow. The deeper it gets the harder it is to drag a sled along behind you.  I'm 6'2".  I mention that to show what I was walking through for the first 50 yards pulling my Frabill Trekker Max shelter.

Those are my knees.  I have a strap tied to the rope for pulling the shelter.  I take this strap and loop it around my waist.  Then I walk until I need to stop to take a breather.  I finally got to an area I figured was in the basin I've identified as good multi-species area. I drilled holes and walked around flashing, looking for fish and a drop off. I drilled a bunch of holes and my depth stayed around seven feet.  I carried a new rod with me; a Frabill Straight-Line combo.  I found one hole with bottom activity.  I dropped the dark Bentley jig down to the level of the commotion on my flasher.  The commotion came up and ate my jig.  What would the commotion be?

Snow courtesy of Google Auto Awesome

It was a crappie!  I love catching crappies!  They are a fish with plenty of personality that hit minnows differently than they hit jigs, than they hit spoons, than they hit Darters and Zippers.  I decided to set up my shelter here.  At least there was one crappie here.  There is almost never only one crappie in an area as they are schooling fish.  I hadn't been in my shelter very long when I found another crappie.  

Then another...

The perch pattern Clam tungsten jig seemed to be the ticket for the crappies today.  The ticket to a 12"+ crappie for me!

I know, I need to get a bump-board to measure fish on before the Kayak Wars season starts up. For now I measure crappie against objects in my ice equipment. See the crappie overflowing the corner-to-corner hold.  The corner-to-corner measurement is 12".  The side to side measurement is 10.75".  That is important to remember after I change jigs.  That happens right about now.

That's an 11" crappie!  I changed to a big glow-in-the-dark Clam tungsten jig with red eyes and accents, tipped with a red maggie and red spikes for extra flavor.  It worked! Drop the jig to the bottom, whap it against the bottom a few times, then raise up a foot or two and watch the crappie zoom in and whack the jig.  I lost a few at the hole that I swear were larger than the 12" but they didn't stay stuck to the jig so I can't prove it.

I caught several more crappie, lost several more, finally what made me decide to stop fishing was I melted my 2# ice line with my heater and the jig dropped off behind it. 

The snow was still falling.  I had to shake it off my shelter as I packed it up.  I had readied my body for the long walk through deep snow back to my car and I still made several stops along the way to catch my breath. The shelter slides easily over ice but snow is a whole other matter.

The ice is good and thick and should stay that way for several more trips out on top of the lakes and ponds.  I hope the ice stays and the snow goes.  I don't mind fishing in the snow but it sure makes it hard to drag my creature comforts with me.  It's those comforts that make it nice to catch Snowy Saturday Crappies.