PRESSURE TACTICS
Too many ice anglers on your favourite lake? You can still quickly find and catch more fish than the rest of the crowd. Here’s how
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Hefty northern pike will often take surprisingly small baits during winterTACTIC #5: GO SMALL
Big baits catch big fish, right? Not necessarily in the winter, when you often can’t go wrong using a small, subtle presentation. My grandson Liam was jigging a tiny 2½-inch Rapala Snap Rap for perch one winter, for example, when he nailed our biggest lake trout ever. Weighing well over 30 pounds, the monster barely squeezed through the 10-inch hole. Think that was a fluke? Not a chance.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve caught and released a monumental trout that coughed up scores of young-of-the-year ciscoes the size of peanuts. My biggest winter pike, meanwhile, was a 52-inch-long, 32-pound megalodon that ate a freshly thawed smelt the size of your middle finger. And my personal-best wintertime crappie, a splendid 17-inch Rainy Lake pie plate, sucked in a homemade, 1/40th-ounce craft-hair jig the size of my fingernail.
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Still not convinced small baits rule during winter? While studying pike in simulated winter conditions in the lab, my good friend and renowned fisheries biologist John Casselman offered the captive fish an unlimited supply of minnows for food—most ate nothing bigger than your finger. Then there’s my buddy Christian Therrien, who recently completed his doctoral research on lake trout. The typical prey he found rummaging through countless trout stomachs were ciscoes and smelt measuring two to four inches in length, despite the multitude of much larger prey fish in the lakes he was studying. During winter, small is clearly big business.