Originally Posted by
603bass
Doubtful that this will come as a surprise to anyone, but I got skunked. No ice anywhere on the lake, surface temp was 39-40 in the entire mid lake area, and 37 south of the island. I tried hitting 5 different areas, only two had any bait fish showing up. First spot had a lot of bait fish, in anywhere from 20-50 feet of water. Highest concentrations, and spots I was marking something of size blasting through the bait fish, were 25-30 feet. Anything deeper and it was just thin schools of bait fish, and only random bigger fish here and there, but there wasn't many.
Focused on that area for a good 3 hours, fishing every size/color combination of a blade bait that I own. No takers. I may have gotten 2-3 bites, but I can't say for certain, I could have just lightly snagged something as well. Those where I really thought I got a bite hit at about 30 feet. Tried the other areas and didn't mark anything, but assumed the fish were there anyway and that I wouldn't be able to mark them, which I learned from some very helpful insight I got from a few guys here and on Facebook. Thank you very much for that guys, I appreciate it.
I was probably fishing too fast, both in how fast I was snapping the blade, and how often. I realized I was fishing pretty fast late in the morning, so managed to get myself to "slow" down a bit. Tried subtle lifts and subtle drags for a bit, both long casts and dropping straight down, but no takers. I think the longest I was waiting between lifts at any point though was about 20 seconds. That still remains one of my biggest weaknesses when the water gets this cold, I still fish too damn fast. It got worse as the hours went by and I was getting somewhat frustrated with myself for not figuring it out, and that led me to fishing faster and faster without realizing it until the end. Oh well. Just have to work harder to correct it.
Had to shovel the launch a little bit, but there's some thick-ish icy snow about 15-20 feet up from where the concrete part of the launch ends that was pretty much ice actually, I couldn't shovel it out. Plenty of running room though to get up to speed and blast through it in 4WD, I got the whole concrete portion completely cleared away. It's going to snow a little bit up there again tomorrow, but if someone wanted to go after that, whatever snow falls should shovel out really easily.