No question that the unmistakable blips sashaying across your electronics are a herd of big ’gills. You’ve been trying to catch them for hours, but no matter what you do, the fish seem entirely content to merely follow your bait up or down—even to just stare at it when you hold it steady. It’s the strangest and most frustrating thing. Finally, a friend plops down an Aqua-Vu Camera and says, “Set the hook!”
So you set it just to humor your buddy. Fish on! Then, like a jolt, a revelation: The fish have been eating your bait all day long. You simply weren’t detecting the bites. You now watch fish after fish ease up and inhale your bait without ever sending a signal back up the line.
This scenario haunts even the best ice anglers. And I suspect it’s a recurring event as regular as a revolving door, for those who don’t use an underwater camera. For people accustomed to using cameras, however, going fishing without one feels like entering a lab without a microscope. Underwater cameras lend many clues about what’s going on under the ice, yielding real images that are nearly impossible to misinterpret.
South Dakota ice angler Dennis Kassube used his underwater camera to select for bigger fish during the 2005 North American Fishing Championship, on Lake Mary near Alexandria, Minnesota. “Our flashers revealed that we were on fish,” says Kassube. “Everybody fishing was catching fish. But we needed to catch bigger fish. The key was getting our bait in front of the right size bluegills and crappies—which is impossible with just sonar.”
According to legendary iceman Dave Genz, “Cameras make it easier to quickly identify fish behavior and location. In fact, some ice-fishing tournament anglers may spend an entire day searching with cameras. With a two-man team, one guy drills while the other views. Some days these boys never wet a line, but they take notes and compare observations, which gives them a better understanding of the fish and how to catch them.”
The search to pattern fish might take four holes or forty. Sooner or later, though, you see some fish. Continue employing the camera and ask yourself: What is it about the vegetation at this depth that’s compelling fish to hold here? What is it about the depth? What’s the temp? Often, the answers come after seeing the same scenario unfold over and over in a number of locations.
Before sonar, the scene on ice was often just a man holding a pole, standing over a hole in the ice. Using sonar was revolutionary and remains a vital ice-fishing tool today. Genz says that before underwater cameras, anglers had only the support of sonar to locate and understand fish behavior. “We used to search for pockets in the weeds, mainly so we still could differentiate our baits from fish and vegetation on the screen,” he explains. “But the underwater camera reveals that the biggest ’gills were in the dense weeds, which taught us that we needed to get our baits right into the dense stalks. During the day, a panfish’s main mission is to hide from pike. And if there’s heavy cover available, you can bet panfish are going to be hanging deep in the cover.”
