Ice Fishing Largemouth Bass

I guess this will be my last post of the year 2013... This has been a crazy year that started with record flooding which rolled right into record drought and heat, which then bypassed fall, tornadoes came rolling through in November and we are finishing up with some very cold weather and lots of ice for ice fishing!!

So with all that being said, lets expound upon the ice fishing.... lets talk ice fishing largemouth bass. Everyone thinks ice fishing is for panfish and rightfully so....but there are many days when you can go out and sit on a bucket and catch lots of BIG bass!!


These big girls will eat in the winter time, dont kid yourselves thinking otherwise.... Last week we were reeling in an 11" bass when a monster bass tried swallowing it just a couple feet from the hole...

So anyhow one early morning last week we headed out to Illinois' Secret Lake X Bass Lake and we caught quite a few big female largemouths!!! Here are some pics:













Some of you may recognize this Morton high schooler... He won the state bass fishing championship last year and apparently has the magic touch through the ice as well...


The advantage to ice fishing is that you can pattern fish very well... you can get right on top of them...literally. Its still best to fish lowlight and be very quiet and all those things you instinctively learn while open water fishing. But with ice fishing it is even more so a game of inches than with open water fishing. In open water 10% of the anglers catch 90% of the fish but with ice fishing its more like 1% of the anglers catch 99% of the fish..... and the difference is usually just mere inches and tiny nuances. You have to fine tune everything from the location, bait selection, presentation, timing, line visibilty and strength, fighting techniques and if you get all those right you still have to fit a big fish through a tiny hole at the end..... In my opinion ice fishing bass is 100 times more fun than open water fishing bass.....