Home Forums Fishing Freshwater pike ice fishing

does any one know what to use for pike ice fishing i have never fished for pike befor and wanted to give it a try can any one give any good tricks please pictures will help a lot thanks

Well were to start,, lots of options...

Get some tip-ups, or heavier icefishing rods can jig...

Have you ever icefished before?? Where do you plan to go???

Ive caught pike jigging and on tip ups, both works..

Northern dave is a guru of icefishing in the great white north maybe he can chime in...

Yep, ND is the "go to" guy for pseudo-canadian sports.

Ask me and I'll tell you to wait for ice out in June, when its nice and warm....

Ingwe

Click link, this will keep you busy for a while.

Report back here with specific questions

http://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/3694131/1/Pike_need_lovin_too

How can I get you to build me a skookum ice shack like yours???

Ingwe

yes i have been ice fishing but only for trout and perch

Hope your not planning on ice fishing in Nevada? lol
Here's a link to some good reading..
http://www.iceshanty.com/

A dark house and a spear.

dead hanging sucker minnows.

Pike aren't stupid, and like the free, no effort lunch....

Plain frozen smelt, rigged with a single hook to suspend horizontally, works almost as well, but the best kept secret is whole frankfurters rigged the same!

Ted

ya i am ice fishing in nevada northern nevada it gets way cold up here

Here's my wife doing a little icefishing!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj7XEpUed4I

That's awesome!

We use suckers on a tipup, placed about eight inches off the bottom, near a drop off into deeper water. We also use whiskey and a cribbage board.

I love drunken hand to hand combat with the water wolf.

Fear the water wolf!

Pass the whisky!

Never heard of the water wolf before i likes.. Going to have to start saying that one...

There's a story.

My late best friend/cousin and I created the story for the kids many years ago.

The original water wolf resides in lake of the woods MN.

He's old, he's obviously huge and boy he's mean.

If you have ever fished lake of the woods over on the south west side near warroad mn you would have likely heard the train ripping through town. it comes down from Canada on the west side of the lake then curves to the east & follows along for many miles to the east.

When it blows through town the whistle sounds very loud all the way through town and as it crosses the bridge for the warroad river that spills into the lake.

When the train comes through town and sounds the whistle you can sometimes spot the water wolf sticking his head up through an old ice fishing hole. he howls at the Canadian train as it blows through town rumbling across that old iron bridge.

He's so old he doesn't even grow teeth any more. He uses fish hooks for teeth, he's constantly spooling out tip ups & fishing reels as he steals new fish hooks to use for teeth.

When you get spooled or snap a line on lake of the woods, it's the water wolf taking your hook to use for a tooth.

you don't catch the water wolf, he catches you.

Great story, especially the teeth!

Never heard it before.
Ted

Awesome story, always amazes me what people can think up............

love the story thanks

Northern Dave, how far north in MN are you? I moved to Montevideo in July and would love to get into some quality ice-fishing for the wolf, other than running back across the border to SD to known honey holes. Where you at?

A stones throw from lake of the woods

pike infested waters.

Yikes, you're up there a ways!

There are pike places farther north.







Ted

dark shack, big hole, white/red pike decoy and a good spear are required.
nice little wood stove and a 6 pack of PBR are the essential options. Makes me homesick just thinking about it.

I was with you right up till "6 pack"



X4

I didnt know they packaged beer in small quantities.....

I'm just sayin....

it was a long snowmobile ride through a lot of state forest to get home at the end of the day.
Used to pour a couple cans of corn in the hole, they'd line the bottom and make it easier to see fish cruising by. Always had a jig pole and some wax worms for perch.

what do you guys use for bait?

In my parts we use cisco, smelt (both dead frozen baits) or live sucker minnows anywhere up to 10" long.

it's damn near time too.

We will be needing pics dude....

Early ice pike can be outstanding.

too bad I'm still deer hunting...

When you do go pike fishing and catch some, post pics of it frying up...in the form of Canadian shore lunch, its the only fish I like to eat.....

Dead smelt, definitely dead smelt.

we use to use wooden decoys on a jerk string for spearing. use to hang them about 18" below the ice. some times we'd use live suckers as well.

wow 10" long bait ha what about chicken liver or gold fish?

gold fish would be illegal but I damn sure bet it would work. Chicken liver? Well... that might work but you'd be more likely to catch a mess of fat eelpout on that kind of rig and we get enough of them on our other dead baits the way it is.

Aww the pout. The fresh water torsk.

That eelpout could feed Olie, Lena and Sven's whole families!!


ddj

that fish is huge we do not realy have a live bait shop where i live would frozen work as good

ND, good lord man.. How much did that way... Ive pulled some nice pout out of the ice, but nothing like that... Crazy..

I dunno, randomly nabbed it off the web (pic)

But we've cought em that big before, hell of a fight, hell of a stink when they come up too, yuck.

And they like to wrap around things. Like your arm. Kinda freaks you out the first time.

ND: near as I can tell, thats what we call a "ling" here. And yep, never seen one that big, and yep, they wrap around your arms..

yep, that's the critter.

ling, eelpout, burbout... freshwater cod, poormans lobster...

(now I've done it...)

We target them in early Spring up here. A few of them reach 20 pounds or better. Biggest one in this picture is around ten.



Fish from ten to a hundred feet of water, occasionally deeper. Bright spoons worked two to three feet off sand or gravel bottoms, and plastic jigs fished just inches from the bottom do the trick quite nicely.






They are a delicious eating fish, but do not keep well unless frozen, totally immersed in water, and ice cream buckets work good for that.

Ted

They get targeted here too, but usually with cut bait...five pounds is a big one here...

never seen em cleaned that nice before. we just back strap em.

which can be ugly.

Next batch I catch, I'll take some video of the cleaning process, Dave. It's actually very simple, and wastes virtually no meat.

Ted

I sure would appreciate that and I know my uncle would too, he's crazy about that stuff.

Hey, guys check out my new ice fishing truck.

(I'm not kidding)

hell i use suckers that big in summer......fun using bait as big as the trout the fly fishing guys in the mountains try and catch(ingwe ) have caught some nice walleye off big suckers, northerns like them too.....

bastid.....

what now smoking a turd in hell for me? im disappointed

will have to get over there one of these times and you can haul my busted arse out so i can reel in dinks too like yah did with Marc

Dinks are good...rod or gun..makes no matter

But in the land of dinkdom, doesn't less matter... more?

Sheer profundity....

I hope that remark doesn't mean you've switched from a leopard-print to a sheer thong.

Dave - what's with the new regs on using smelt in MN? Is it just me or is it a load of dung?

dude what?

no idea I havent looked at the regs.

whats up?

According to new regs, we can't use frozen smelt or ciscoes unless they have been processed by a bait dealer that has processed them to eliminate VHS. http://news.dnr.state.mn.us/index.p...d-smelt-used-for-bait-must-be-preserved/

I think it's a load of dung and would LOVE to know what special process they are using to kill the virus. I understand not wanting it to spread, but how hard is it going to be to find smelt this year for northerns?

Discussion on it here... http://www.hotspotoutdoors.com/foru...yone_use_chunks_of_fish_on_t#Post2368451