If you’re an ice fisherman, especially in southern Michigan, you can’t be very happy about the last two winters. Ice conditions ranged from sketchy to nonexistent. And if your preferred game involves jumping on a snowmobile or quad and heading well offshore, the odds are good you didn’t get out at all. But a lack of ice shouldn’t keep you from fishing. There are usually still plenty of opportunities to get out on open water during moderate winters.
Many of the state’s rivers are, if not wide open, open enough to get in or on the water. Steelhead fishing is the most obvious game, and, frankly, that’s my preferred time to fish for steelhead. It’s a lot less crowded on the streams than in spring. The fishing is challenging, but it can be very good. Aside from steelheading, there are plenty of opportunities that’ll allow you to scratch your fishing itch without risking your neck on unsafe ice.
Consider pike, for instance. While chasing pike under the ice (with tip-ups, spearing or traditional rod-and-reel angling) is a prime winter sport, the pike don’t stop biting just because there isn’t any ice over the heads. My buddy Jim Horn turned me on to winter pike fishing a few years back on the St. Joseph River. He convinced me the fishing can be as good as any time pike season is open. Pike prefer colder water than most of our other warm-water species.
We fished with spinnerbaits, spoons, jigs, deep-diving jerk baits and Rat-L-Traps along areas where there had been lush weed beds in the summer. And we started catching pike almost immediately.
“A lot of pike fishing is the same as bass fishing,” Horn said. “You might use bigger lures and fish a little bit deeper, but you’ll still catch bass. I don’t think pike hold as close to the cover as bass or they’re willing to come a little bit farther for a bait. You don’t have to fish the water as hard as pike are typically more aggressive, so you can cover more water, not making as many casts to the same target.”
We generally positioned the boat well back from the dying weeds, made long casts and retrieved our lures slowly. With the spinnerbaits, for instance, we slow-rolled them. With the jerk baits, we’d jerk them down and let them sit awhile before we jerked them again. We fished the jigs the same way you normally would cold-water bassin”—throw it out there, let it hit bottom, and grow a beard while retrieving it. With a sinking rattling bait, fish it slowly or fish it like a jig – pick it up, let it fall, repeat.
Remember, pike season closes on March 15 and reopens on the last Saturday of April.
If you prefer fishing for bluegills, crappie and perch, think about where you chase panfish at first ice. Some of the best areas to fish on first ice are cuts and canals off the main lake. The fish move into those areas in early winter and are there before it ices up. If, like last year, we get early ice, but it disappears quickly, they’ll be there for a while.
One of my favorite pre-ice/post-ice fishing trips is on Lake St. Clair, where the crappie and bluegill fishing is excellent but overshadowed by all the other world-class fishing the lake offers. The last time I went, I was with a couple of buddies, and we fished around docks, boat houses, seawalls, the few boats that were still in the water, and even in the open water areas of the canals. We smoked them but had to throw a lot back as there were plenty of too-small-to-fillet finsters in there. We fished with small jigs under slip bobbers tipped with small plastic tails. You can use live bait, such as wax worms, just as well, but the plastic bodies held up well, and we didn’t have to re-bait as often as if we used live bait. That makes a difference when the temperatures are freezing, and you want to keep your hands dry.
If there’s a key to this style of fishing, it’s presenting the bait at the proper depth. I generally like to set my slip bobber so the jig hangs about a foot off bottom and adjust as I go. The fish will tell you where they want it (just like ice fishing), and if there are several of you in the boat, you can experiment at different depths to see who’s winning and who isn’t. The last time I did this, fishing with Zack Watts and Theron Hoffman, we finally settled on fishing about 18 inches under the bobber in water that was three- to five- feet deep. We wound up keeping about 50 fish – seven-inch bluegills and pumpkinseeds, eight-inch perch and 10-inch crappies – but had to catch about four times that many to get the keepers. Fishing was excellent.
Perhaps the most popular non-ice winter fishing target is walleyes. Since the fisheries pooh-bahs decided it would be OK to fish the Saginaw River year-round, the boat traffic on the Saginaw in the winter is like I-75 on a summer holiday weekend. I’ve fished it a lot in recent winters with varying results. We always catch fish, generally lots of them, but catching keepers can be difficult because the river is so loaded with undersized ‘eyes that you’ve got to catch handfuls of them to get a 13-incher.
But it’s not always that way. A couple years back, I was fishing in early March, after the river had iced up but melted away, with long-time fishing guide Brandon Stanton and another guy, and we put 24 solid keepers in the boat. It’s been my experience in recent years that the size of the fish increases dramatically the later it gets in winter. If there’s one conclusion I’ve drawn, it’s that the river is jam-packed with immature walleyes, and as spawning season approaches, the fish that are migrating in from the bay begin showing up. Last winter, for instance, I was fishing with my buddy Greg Sochocki and brother Phil just days before New Year’s, and we wound up with 10 keepers, but we had to catch about 100 fish to get that many. Still, it’s hard to complain about catching too many fish, isn’t it?
The Saginaw River isn’t the only open-water walleye fishery, of course, and I’ve had several good trips on the St. Joe River fishing with jigs, jigging spoons and Jigging Rapalas. And, of course, the Detroit River is open year-round, but it can be tough fishing in a cold winter as ice flows from further upstream can be problematic.
Last winter, I had a couple of good trips fishing for lake trout on big water – Grand Traverse Bay and Torch Lake – in February and March, respectively.
That I wound up on Grand Traverse Bay was just happenstance. I had originally planned to fish the Muskegon River with Denny Bouwens for steelhead, but Bouwens was wary of the crowds on the river, so we headed up to Elk Rapids instead. Bouwens invited his son Brett to join us, and though we were breaking skim ice on the way out – it was 22 degrees out – once we got out in open water, we drove around and watched the sonar. We found a big school of bait fish about 10 feet off the bottom in 100 feet of water.
“That’s the key,” Denny said. “Find the baitfish, and you’ll find the lake trout.”
We dropped jigging spoons, and in no time, I became one with a nice laker. It was the only fish we caught before the marks on the sonar disappeared, which didn’t take long, and we went looking again. The next time we found some, Brett caught a similar laker, this time in 115 feet of water.
Long story short, we never got on a big concentration of fish. It was one here, one there, fishing in as deep as 130 feet, but by the time we were done, we’d boated six lakers and two very nice ciscoes.
My trip to Torch Lake was similar. It was 22 degrees when we started. I was fishing with Jim Chamberlin, my brother Phil, and Chamberlin’s mate Adam Skrocki. We started out trolling for Atlantic salmon, but when that didn’t produce, we headed out to deep-water structure and started jigging. We used heavy jigging spoons tipped with a large minnow head in 100-plus feet of water. It didn’t take long. Skrocki stuck a lake trout followed by each of us in turn. The bite was on, and over the course of an hour, we put eight lakers in the boat.
When the bite died, we moved even deeper and found a big wad of baitfish in 212 feet of water. There weren’t any lake trout under them, but we caught two more fish – burbot.
“Basically, we’re chasing an ice fishing pattern, and I think that would apply to any lake with lake trout this time of year,” Chamberlin said. “It’s where you go any time before the water temp gets up in the 40s.
“Baitfish seem to be the key. Find out where the baitfish want to live, and it seems like other species of fish are there, too. It could be burbot. It could be lake trout. It could be whitefish. It could be ciscoes. And we’ve even caught brown trout on those same jigs. You never know what you’re going to catch when you fish those deep-water bait schools.”
I’m looking forward to ice fishing season, of course. But what I’ve discovered over the last couple of winters is that if we don’t get ice, there’s still plenty of opportunity. Basically, go to the same places you’d go ice fishing, slow down, and fish. You’ll get ’em.
You must be logged in to post a comment.