Hello everyone....I just wanted to give everyone a quick fishing report of what we have been seeing this week on the ice.

Again this past week we saw alot of fishing pressure on the well known mud flats and gravel bars.  I mentioned last week in my report about either choosing a less crowded structure to fish or fish deeper than most if in a crowded area.  The deeper water really produced alot of nice keeper walleyes, a few big fish each day and more and more jumbo perch with each trip out.  We drilled very few holes on the top/top edges this past week and started focusing our efforts on finding the bottom breaks.  Areas you would normally pick out on your lakemaster chip with inside turns/knuckles, points etc.  The fish were still relating to alot of these key walleye areas but you needed your holes to be right on that bottom break.  The fish were really holding tight to this break this last week.  If you got too high moving up the break line you didn't catch as many fish.  Error deeper into the basin was better than fishing up the break lines.

When you get off the structures you will start to see alot of bait.  There are millions (or more) of those 3-5" perch all over the basin areas right now.  That is bad news for the larger fish who can easily catch these.  This is good news for the keeper size walleyes and jumbo perch.  You will see this bait all over your Macho Minnow, then it suddenly disappears when the walleyes or jumbo perch move in.  You will see these fish are chasing your spoons very aggressive as well.  Swimming amongst all this bait they can't catch and then suddenly something smaller in front of them equals a quick strike.

The Northland Macho Minnow tipped with a small minnow head continued to out-fish almost all other baits we tried.  If you are perch fishing only, I would switch over to a small forage minnow with red euro's.  For those that are looking for walleyes as well, keep your minnow heads on.  Aggressive jigging has been better this week.  The fish are really biting right now.

I have attached a photo from our trip yesterday.  We had several trips like this one over the past week.  Lots of nice walleyes and some real nice perch.  We saw a few perch pushing over 14" this week.  A reminder that our Perch Weekend is approaching fast.  Call Hunters Point to reserve your spot with us for the weekend of March 5-7th.  It will be a great weekend of fishing!

Tony will have more details on this Thursdays Podcast on our website. 

Each day is different on the water...but give the deeper breaks a try.  We hope this helps you put some more fish on the ice.  Until next week.....we hope to see you on the ice!

-- Edited by Scott Bickett on Tuesday 19th of January 2010 05:39:12 PM