Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January/February 2020 i In-Fisherman

DECEMBER 28 Uncharted Adventure Destinations > North America’s Favorite Sportfish > Rivers & Streams Close to Home > Canadian Monsters or Bust JANUARY 4 Fast Action & Fine Times > Soft Trailer Largemouths > Spring Crappie Classics > Busting Shallow Gators JANUARY 11 Presentation Sleight-of-Hand > Anchoring Strategies for Big Fish > Historic Hook Designs > Swimbait-Hook Largemouths JANUARY 18 Gold-Standard Tactics for Today > Tactical Smallmouths > Summer Peak Largemouths > New-Age Classic Walleye Lures JANUARY 25 Perfect Storm for Giant Sportfish > World of Giant Walleyes > Situational Bull Redfish > Perfect Storm for Giant Sportfish FEBRUARY 1 Hot Baits Happening > The Magic Light Switch > Slow-Rolling Crappies > MaxScent Largemouths FEBRUARY 8 Sportfishing Magic & Mayhem > The Wide World of Smallmouths > Trolling Striper Giants…

S. J. Cooke, C. M. Bunt, J. F. Schreer, and D. H. Wahl compared three methods for estimating mobility of smallmouths in Lake Erie—tag and recapture, conventional telemetry, and electromyogram (EMG) telemetry.* All methods were tested in the same area during the summer of 1998. A total of 967 smallmouth bass were captured and marked in the tagging portion and 41 were eventually recaptured. The mean distance traveled between mark and recapture was estimated at 281 meters, give or take 32 meters. A total of 16 bass were implanted with conventional telemetry transmitters. The mean daily movement was estimated at 77 meters, give or take 10 meters. But the mean gross movement, more roughly comparable to distances measured by tag-and-recapture, was 3,018 meters, give or take 449 meters. Authors noted…

Each year at Christmas so many years after fishing together for the last time, Vic and I would exchange greetings. With the eye of an artist, he always sent a card with a beautiful pastel painting, typically of wildlife or of a wild setting. That last card, in 2005, was of a mother polar bear and two cubs in early-morning light. Like so many of that war-time generation, including my father, who served in the U.S. Navy as a medic for a time assigned to the Royal Dutch Marines, they were smokers, and it was the cause of health issues years later. “However,” he wrote that last time, “the good news is that I’ve been pronounced clear, so it’s only some time to get back to normal. I look forward…

Why anyone would need to harvest 10 or 20 14-inch crappies for dinner is a head-scratcher. Which raises the primary problem with benthic basin bites. If fish are coming up from more than 20 to 25 feet deep, it’s safe to assume they’re already part of your daily harvest—whether you know it or not. Barotrauma is an often unnoticed source of fishing mortality for fish harvest from deep water. If you’re on a lake that’s bursting at the seams with crappies in the 8- to 11-inch range, maybe you plan ahead of time to harvest just enough fish for a meal before moving on to shallower spots. But, if your lake basins swarm with larger fish—12- to 16-inch crappies, bluegills in excess of 9 inches, perch over 12—you might be…

Everything changes yet somehow stays the same, while each year the old becomes new again. As much could be said about the strictly fishing portion of wheelhouse angling today. It’s true, we have more technology and innovation packed into these dream yachts on ice than ever before, but the “dropping a line” part is much the same as it has always been. Stationary fishing has been around longer than bobbers, which is why it may be difficult to impart new wrinkles into what are traditional tactics. Yet, today’s wheelhouse angling can impart certain advantages, which allows serious anglers to leverage advanced tactics that make full use of these modern marvels on ice. Call them new or call them just riffs on old advice, by employing these strategies you’ll be calling…

A highlight of this issue is our focus on the combination of presentation and retrieve methods now collectively known as Ned rigging. Our cover illustration (which I consider one of Larry Tople’s finest) has a largemouth bass eyeing a Ned rig. Herein we celebrate the beginning of this phenomenon by rerunning the article by In-Fisherman Field Editor Ned Kehde that set it all in motion exactly a decade ago. A decade down the road for what now is, or is becoming, one of the most celebrated presentation methods of all time. We have Texas rigging. Carolina rigging. Drop-shotting. Neko rigging. And Ned rigging stands right in there with the best of them. Certainly it remains a method of the moment, as more and more anglers discover it and join the…

Winter bass are notoriously reticent, one reason fishing pressure hits its nadir from November through January. I’m not one to be housebound, though, when there are bass to be caught. I try to fish four or five times a week, year-round, generally for four hours in midday. Our long-standing goal is 101 bass a day, a total considered daunting, even at the hottest bass lakes in Mexico. Yet we occasionally achieve that total, even in the dead of winter. Our key is using finesse tactics beyond the realm of what most anglers normally try when the bite gets tough. Meanwhile, standard tactics can be nearly fruitless. Here’s an example of what I mean: Last November, 55 international and state champions competed in the BASS Federation Nation Championship at Milford Lake…

The nature of ice fishing pits angler versus fish in a largely vertical arena. One problem: Dropping lures through vertical holes in ice—working them up and down, up and down—goes against everything aquatic, everything natural. Water moves laterally, clinging to the laws of gravity, coursing along a mostly horizontal landscape. Water freezes, ice forming across the horizon. Eventually, the contrast becomes a dilemma that greatly limits our success—that neither walleyes nor prey operate on vertical planes of existence. The body shapes, underwater orientations, and movements of fish tell us everything we need to know about the most natural way to approach the game. So, we ask ourselves: How exactly do we accomplish the task—to mimic the horizontal movements of walleye prey—when we’re limited to operating within the vertical cylinder that…

It’s impossible not to ponder the future of ice fishing the first time you wander out over a deep lake basin with one of Garmin’s new Panoptix units, or Humminbird Mega 360 Imaging. With both types of underwater radar, drilling a single hole in the ice unlocks a broad circumference of under-ice activity—up to 100 feet in every direction around your position, all revealed on the fishfinder screen. Ultimately, I’m not so sure that’s a positive, given that a lot of ice anglers are out there primarily to fill a 5-gallon bucket with fish fillets. I suppose it comes down to a simple choice: exploit the technology to help stock your freezer, or as an opportunity for learning, not so different from the things we continue to discover with an…

Last year after my wife and I packed up our pre-lighted, seven-foot, artificial Colorado spruce Christmas tree, it took six months to vacuum up the green “needles” that fell on the living room floor. I don’t know what they are made of, but Jezebel, our Pom-silky terrier, didn’t want to eat them, and she will gladly eat anything that doesn’t move, and lots of things that do. I have to admit, when loaded with our lifetime collection of ornaments, the tree looked especially festive. But we’d had the thing for at least 10 years, and it was time to get a new one, hopefully a non-shedding model. In September, not one to wait until the last minute, I was running through the worldwide fake tree inventory on Amazon when the…

One Ugly Knife Ugly Stik tools aren’t exactly “ugly,” but they’re built Ugly Stik tough, and include shears, a skinner, pliers, and a lineup of five knives, one of which is a 7-inch flex-blade fillet knife, with coated steel and a comfortable Ugly Tuff Grip. The sheath has a knife sharpener—$24.99, uglystik.com Primo Under-Spin Leadhead jigs excel in providing depth and speed control, and the addition of a blade on a silky smooth ball-bearing swivel below the head on the Gamakatsu Under Spin adds flash and vibration to make an efficient and effective presentation coupled with your favorite softbait body, which is held securely in place by a screw-lock. Sizes range from 3/16 to 1/2 ounce, all with 4/0 hooks—$4.86, gamakatsu.com Lighter, Stronger Veritas Abu Garcia Veritas rods are 5…

A study on Ranger Lake in Ontario reveals stark differences in the movements of smallmouths and largemouths monitored with EMG tags.5 These are the movements of four fish over a single day—two smallmouths (SMB) and two largemouths (LMB). Numbers reveal time of day for each location (military time), and demonstrate that 1) both small-mouths used the entire lake each day and 2) both patrolled inshore during morning hours and offshore during afternoon and evening hours. Largemouths stayed inshore and utilized far less of the lake during the same study period.…

A Bit of History— By the time I joined In-Fisherman in 1981, readers were aware that bigger pike preferred colder water. Big fish were at home cruising the thermocline in summer, or hanging out near cold-water springs in rivers. The Coldwater Periods, spring and fall, increased the potential for primo fishing, as bigger fish reappeared from the abyss. Given the nature of the fish, no surprise, some of the best fishing transpired during winter. Of course, winter pike fishing was in most ways a primitive affair in those days. Oh, we had Beaver Dam tip-ups—and Paul Grahl was just introducing his Polar Tip-Up, which he guaranteed would never freeze up. Driving a Chevy truck that soon had 500,000 miles on it around North America, selling ice tackle, his HT Enterprises…

There’s a misconception among people who know me that I enjoy ice fishing. I spend enough time on the ice to portray the image of an avid ice angler, but the truth is that I don’t really “like” to ice fish. I do it so I don’t kill anyone during homicidal rage inflicted by a severe bout of cabin fever. Those of you who live in southern climates cannot fully grasp this dire concept of cabin fever until you’ve lived in the Upper Midwest for at least a decade (or a lifetime). Visiting here in the winter, even frequently, cannot give you the sense of despair caused by mind-numbing overcast skies and bitterly cold temperatures for months on end. Sometimes the only cure is to therapeutically shank a crappie and…