Ice fishing reports and pics

Well, it looks like we are going to have at least a 10-14 day window for ice fishing here in mid-February in Central Illinois.The last few days there have been several groups out ice fishing, here are the reports and pics!

Out at the Giant Goose Ranch, several groups went out over the weekend, and everyone did great!!Mike from Chicago had an awesome day on the big lake where he iced over 40 bass using a swedish pimple in 8-14' water around submerged islands. He somehow managed to land several very large bass through the tiny hole:



Mike also found an awesome limit of panfish as well. Im pretty sure he stuck with the swedish pimple most of the time, since the fish were pretty active.


Dave and his son fished the old duck blind island on big lake and their first fish was this nice rainbow trout!


Several groups hit High Rise lake for yellow perch and everyone did awesome with limits over the weekend. Most reported 30-50 perch. Here is the Woodson boys catch, they are gonna be eating good!


Steve and his group hit up one of our other lakes and did really well on giant bluegill!





They saved enough time to hit the perch zone as well:



Chef Todd also did pretty good over the weekend!


This albino catfish was on his bucket list!


Chris had the most safe ice and hosted a large group to raise money for hooked on fishing park and one lucky guy caught this monster:


Christian and Justin did some perch fishing awhile back in Justins backyard and did pretty good finding some Dakota Gold!





We have been working nonstop out at the Goose Ranch building cabins and have only been able to ice fish just a few minutes here and there but I did find a nice walleye while scouting around on thin ice earlier this season:


Us Herman Bros took our wives and kids out for an hour Sat evening and got on an insane hybrid striper bite! The fast action had alot to do with the new boost product from Zebco. In 10 yrs of hybrid striper fishing through the ice, I have never had them biting this well through the ice, they were on fire with all that fish scent in the water! We landed about 30 of them and kept 4 of the smaller ones for dinner! We literally had 1-3 fish on at a time for 30 minutes straight!!





So anyhow, when the ice is safe the fishing is GREAT! I couldnt be more thrilled with how everything is progressing at the Giant Goose Ranch. The fisheries there are well on their way to becoming the best multi-species fishing lakes in the entire nation! Next week we are chainsawing a big hole through the ice and stocking 5000 more rainbow, brook, and brown trout into big lake.

Also another really exciting fish stocking program is the specialty species that are native to Illinois. We are working with the Illinois DNR to stock 13 of the goose ranch lakes and ponds with many different native broodfish species! This is super exciting!!