[font='PT Sans', Arial, sans-serif]Took up an invitation from a member of OhioGameFishing to fish a private borrow pit from a highway. Good chance to knock the dust off the ice gear, but quite possibly ruined my ice season for the rest of the year! Can not remember a day on the ice with so many QUALITY fish in my life. That is what you get sometime on these little private ponds. [/font]
[font='PT Sans', Arial, sans-serif]Fish were darn near non-stop for the first few hours. Crazy thing is that i don't think i ever caught a fish under 7.5" the whole day. We ended with 43 fish getting cleaned. Out of those, maybe 5 fish were under 8" and those were very likely ones that i kept early on before seeing the consistent size this lake had to offer. At a certain point, we mostly gave up keeping the gills and started trying to focus a little more on the crappie. Did get a few good size crappie. Easily threw back another 30 to 40 fish and many of those were 9" bluegill. 7 of the 43 keepers were crappie and all but 1 crappie was caught on hair jigs. Biggest crappie went 12" and the 2 biggest were both black nose crappie. Majority of bluegill were caught on plain jigs with waxies, but i did get quite a few gills on hair jigs with no bait needed.[/font]
[font='PT Sans', Arial, sans-serif]Guessing we cut 15 to 20 holes but ended up catching catching fish only out of 5 or so holes that were cut early on in a nice big circle. Ice was pressure crunching and popping in the afternoon. Beautiful day with no wind to speak of. Tough to top a day like this and can say there is positively no dust left on my ice gear. Nice Colombus Brewing Co. IPA (or 2) was my reward while cleaning.[/font]
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[font='PT Sans', Arial, sans-serif]Fish were darn near non-stop for the first few hours. Crazy thing is that i don't think i ever caught a fish under 7.5" the whole day. We ended with 43 fish getting cleaned. Out of those, maybe 5 fish were under 8" and those were very likely ones that i kept early on before seeing the consistent size this lake had to offer. At a certain point, we mostly gave up keeping the gills and started trying to focus a little more on the crappie. Did get a few good size crappie. Easily threw back another 30 to 40 fish and many of those were 9" bluegill. 7 of the 43 keepers were crappie and all but 1 crappie was caught on hair jigs. Biggest crappie went 12" and the 2 biggest were both black nose crappie. Majority of bluegill were caught on plain jigs with waxies, but i did get quite a few gills on hair jigs with no bait needed.[/font]
[font='PT Sans', Arial, sans-serif]Guessing we cut 15 to 20 holes but ended up catching catching fish only out of 5 or so holes that were cut early on in a nice big circle. Ice was pressure crunching and popping in the afternoon. Beautiful day with no wind to speak of. Tough to top a day like this and can say there is positively no dust left on my ice gear. Nice Colombus Brewing Co. IPA (or 2) was my reward while cleaning.[/font]
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