went this morning to a pond at the local wildlife area. Just last week I was thinking about trying the same pond thru the ice. But with near record temperatures the last few days the ice was gone. Usually if i'm fishing this time of year it's in a river for sauger or some other cold water fish but it's rained over an inch in the last 24 hours and all the local streams are high and looking like chocolate milk. But it was warm and I wanted to go bad so I ended up at the pond. With the ice only gone a couple days I decided the way to go was to pretend it was still there. I used the same tiny slip floats and handmade ice jigs I would have used thru the ice. In summer this pond becomes a garden of lilly pads and weed beds. Even now you could see extensive weedbeds on the bottom. I set the ice jigs up under the floats so they would just tick the tops of the weeds and tipped them with waxworms. Then I would cast out and just let the action of the winds and waves work the jigs and left them alone. The only spot I could find fish was off one little weedy point that stuck out four or five feet further into the lake than the rest of the shoreline. In about an hour I caught seven small bass from eight inches to one that might have went a foot. The float would just begin to move slowly off or sometimes just stop moving with the wind and I'd tighten down and the fish would be on. Only once did they even pull the float underwater as they hit. Fished about three hours total before I got too wet.
And yeah they are little guys. But seven largemouth on January 13th? I can live with that.
