Good evening from the Quiet Lakes, hockey tomorrow so going to get you the report early! We did not end up with nearly as much snow as originally forecasted. I think we may have about 2-3″ on the ground here. I saw a few snowmobile tracks along the trail by our house and watched a guy go straight across the lake today while I was out ice fishing. I did hear a group of people staked Lost Land Lake for the snowmobile trail which is a good sign, however I do not believe we got enough snow to get the groomers out and the trails have to be thin for anyone looking to ride right now. I have also heard that most lakes are safe right now, Moose Lake has 10 inches of ice and most of the Chippewa Flowage is around 8″. A big warm up looks to happen next week with multiple days in the upper 30s and some forecasted rain for next Friday…..ugh……
On a better note, all of the ice we checked today was between 6-8″ of solid black ice and the lakes were making some noise the entire time we were out there. At the current temp of -1 that can only mean we were making more ice as the high today never got out of the teens! We found a whole bunch of perch schooled up in 15 FOW although they were all small. Still fun to catch and mostly on a small tungsten jig and soft plastic. We were fortunate enough to get a decent pike and a few smaller walleye on tip ups rigged with sucker minnows in anywhere from 12-20 FOW close to shallow water with weeds. We did not find any crappie although I have heard some anglers doing well for them on the Chip and on lakes with a little bit deeper basins. Look for those fish in 15-25 FOW and use jigs and plastics or minnows.
That is all I have for this week’s report. Pretty easy fishing right now as fish seem to be where anglers should expect them and they seem to be biting at that twilight/dusk time when you would expect as well. Have a great weekend and we will talk soon!
Greg