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My final pointers on tip up fishing.

If for pike, these tips are double important.

Get some bells for your flags.



Make a long gaff. Most gaffs they sell in bait shops and sporting stores look more like bailing hooks than gaffs. They are all hook and no handle.

You want mostly handle, very little hook. Take something like a wooden broom stick, about 4 feet long. Fasten a hook or make a hook for one end, the radius of the hook curl doesn't need to be any larger than a 50 cent piece.

I took a long shank construction screw, drove it into the end of a wood broomstick till the threads were burried and I had about 2-2.5" of smooth screw shank sticking out. then I cut the head off the screw and sharpened the shank. At this point it looked just like a trash picking stick. Next I heated the shank with a torch, grabbed it with a pliers, curled a hook shape and plunged it in cold water.

That was over 20 years ago, we're still using it today.

You want the long stick for a few reasons. Its a dandy walking stick on the ice when you are making the rounds checking tip ups. Pike roll, they roll that line up like crazy. Many times I have had a pike under the ice, at the hole but he wont come up because he's all rolled up and all I can see is the side or back of him up against the bottom of the ice hole, and a 40" pike wont come through a 10" hole sideways. Late season pike fishing you can have 3' of ice or better. Many times I have poked down the hole with the non hook end of the gaff stick to reach down further than you can reach with your arm to carefully nudge a pike backwards enough to present the head, then quickly flip the gaff around and reach down and carefully mouth hook him for extraction...









Lastly, hook set. When your flag pops up and you go running out there to see your T bar spinning like a helicopter blade.... Most people are going to reach for the board and try to carefully lift the tip up out of the hole, ever so stealthy, they lift until the spool clears the water, then they strip line off the spool.... Oh so tricky.... clever humans.... They set the tip up off to the side then grab the line and start taking up slack ever so slowly... waiting for the fish to run some more, or taking up the slack to feel if the fish is still there.... then eventually a line jerk happens and sometimes it works out.

That's all great fun.

But you can skip all that bullshit and catch more fish if you do this: You get to the tip up and the T bar is spinning. Grab that thing (the T bar), strike like a damn cobra, grab that thing while it's spinning, lock onto that T bar with your hand and jerk that thing out of the hole. You set the hook with the T bar firmly locked up in your hand, lift it and grab that line under the spool with your other hand. Set the tip up off to the side and start your tug of war with that fish.

If it's spinning, he's running out away from you, stringing line behind him with your bait and hook in his mouth, I guarantee, that is your best shot at a hook set. Don't be shy about it, your buddies might think you're nuts, until they figure out it works.