Ice Fishing Bait

Ice Fishing Tips– Bait

If you are an ice fisherman (which 2 million people are in the U.S.), the following bait will bring you even more success.

For Bluegills use tiny ice spoons (1/32 to 1/80 of an ounce), ice flies or No. 10 or 12 gold hooks. Tip them with gall worms, crane fly larvae, mousies, mealworms, wax worms, or maggots. Fish the offering with a light tremble or quivering movement. Try levels from one to three feet off bottom, over depths o f10 to 20 feet. A murky or weedy bottom is best for them.

For crappies, use a Swedish Pimple jiggling spoon, Rapala ice fishing plug or live minnows fished on No. 2 to 6 hooks. Crappies can suspend at just about any depth, from a few feet below the ice to just off bottom, in water from five to 20 feet deep. Move often.

Yellow perch – use the same baits as for crappies and bluegills. Also try jigging spoons sweetened with the eye from a freshly caught perch or a tiny strip of meat sliced from a perch or bluegill.

Trout – shoal areas, the mouths of inlets, and points have produced the most rainbows, browns and brookies through the ice. You can catch them on about every kind of bait or lure you can think of. Wet flies and nymphs with a sp lit-shot crimped a foot above for weight are good, as are minnows, spinners, jigging spoons and ice rapalas.

Pickerel, Pike, Muskies – live minnows or dead ones rigged to hang horizontally in the water are the best producers. Tip-ups allow you to spread your baits over a wide area in weedy coves and on points where these predators rove under the frozen lake’s surface searching for prey.

Walleyes – reefs, points, inlets and outlets are good spots for ice walleyes. Live minnows, jigging Rapalas, Swedish Pimples, Hopkins and Gay Blades are consistent producers.