12-28-2002, 10:47 PM
Fished newton this morning. Guess who was there? Fishnate. What a nice guy. Fishing aside, I have really enjoyed meeting lots of people from this site and fishnate was no exception. The ice was five inches around the edges, but due to yesterdays warm temps there was a couple inches of soft ice on top of the hard stuff out in the center. In places there was still three inches under the soft stuff but you had to be carefull. The fishing was a surprise. Old fishnate is a great rescource for ice fishing the pan fish on newton, but the big surprise was the largemouth bass that you can catch all day long. I dont really find my self fishing the ice where there is much opportunity to catch largemouth so it was fun to catch so many. We also caught perch and bluegill. We kept moving around trying to find the crappie, but we never did find them. I walked over and was talking to fishnate for a while and let me tell you, the man can find fish, he can get them to bite, but he needs bear lake mack to school him in the finer points of hooksetting. No, just kidding. It was pretty funny watching him miss several bites in a row though. I just wished it was me getting them at the time. It was a good day. I will have to let fishnate tell you the technique, depth and lure selection seeing as he caught more fish than we did. Plus, I think he has a few largemouth pics to post up.
]. But hey, it's pretty tough to get a 4-6" fish to engulf a #8 Genz Worm. It was always nice getting a surprize bigger fish. We (Brent, Braden, and I) ended up with about 4-5 bass over 11" upto 15". I think the bass fishing through ice at newton is unique in that the fish are in a high competition situation, especially with the low water, so they feed alot more. For anyone interested in going to newton, ice near the dam is about 5" but its risky going up lake for another little while, the ice was a very slushy 2-3". We found the fish at the deepest areas we could find in the 12-16' range. Alot of people like to hold the jig still but I often get them by actively jigging. Like Predator you gotta be mobil and versatile and then you find luck like we did today. A good day on the ice at newton, I hope we find the crappie next time.
]I was fishing with fishnate on Saturday at Newton, and it was great. We caught quite a few large mouth, a few perch, and one blue gill(Nate's son). I can confirm that fishnate has trouble setting the hook on those fish. It was pretty fun to watch him though. The meal worms were working great out there.