Fishing Forum

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours fishing in that last bay you see on Highway 40. There was about 6 inches of good ice there. The middle of the lake looked frozen (at least 95% covered), but it didn't look safe.

We got there at 7AM and only fished until 10 because we had to get back. It was slower than I expected. We caught a total of 16. 14 of those were rainbows and about 10 of those rainbows were only 12-13 inches long. I don't know what the deal was, maybe it was the bay we were fishing in, but I"ve never caught that many small fish there. We did catch two nice cutts in the 18 inch range, but they had to go back. The fishing was getting a lot better about the time that we had to leave. Wish we could have stayed. We brought home 4 rainbows that were 15-16 inches long.

-Jack
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[cool]Sounds like a fairly good day on the ice, Shrimpboy. I'm not an expert, but I'd guess that as the whole lake freezes, maybe the fishing will get even hotter. Maybe in a week? Good fishin' to ya!
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[]oh yeah, how this was the ice @ Soldier Creek, and what were you guys using?
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The ice was about six inches thick where we were. I only saw one other set of old holes. No one else came to fish while we were there. I didn't venture out to the new ice to see how thick it was.

I started off using a white 1/16 oz paddle bug tipped with a piece of crawler and crawdad smelly jelly. My cousin was using a small glow ice jig with crawler and crawdad jelly under a swedish pimple. Towards the end I switched over the same set up but with a pink shrimpo. That seemed to work a little better.

We were over 23 feet of water and the fishfinder was marking fish at 7 feet, but for some reason they wouldn't have anything to do with us. We would have caught more if we would have gone deeper sooner. We finally started fishing just off the bottom and that was the key. Even though the sonar showed only about 10% as many fish right on the bottom, those were the only ones that wanted to bite.

I'm assuming that once the whole lake freezes that the fishing will pick up too. I hope so anyways. I want to get some big'uns.
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Thanks for the report Shrimpboy, did you notice if anyone was fishing any other part of the lake? WH2
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There was a shack over in Chicken Creek West. There was a lot of activity in that parking lot too. I don't know what was going on though. It looked almost as if they were building something. Maybe some sort of storage for the UDOT place?
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I just got off the phone with a friend that fished near the area you are talking about, he said the same thing they are building something. He said the ice was 5 or6 inches there at Chicken creek west but was surprised they only caught 6 or 7 fish each, most were in the slot. WH2
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