This report is actually for Saturday and Sunday. The girlfriend and I headed up to Lake Curlew late Saturday morning arriving at the State Park around 10:30 a.m. There were at least 40 people out on the ice. We caught zero fish and we didn't see anybody around us pulling up any fish either. We headed to the North end where we saw some guys about 500 ft south of The trestle bringing them in left and right. The slush was pretty deep so we decided not to continue and went back to the South end. We fished the south end for another hour and a half where I caught one perch in about 35 ft of water.

On Sunday I went up with a friend of mine much earlier. We were in the ice by 7:00 a.m. We we're getting fish about every 15 minutes until 10:00 a.m. At that point, the trout seem to have moved in and that's all we were catching. Everyone around us seem to be in the same boat. We headed up north where we proceeded to not get a single thing. However I heard of people at Tiffany's resort doing very well in the afternoon.

The bait that seemed to work the best was a pink 1/16 Oz jig with a white Marabou wrapping. The trout seem to love a 1/32nd oz glow in the dark white jig. Most people tip the setups with perch eyes, however we found grubs to be just as effective.

Earlier reports from a week or two weeks ago had people catching 10 fish an hour. We were really curious why the bite seem to have stopped. And talking to other people and making our own conclusions we came up with two ideas.

1. Perch got hit so hard for 2 to 3 weeks that there wasn't many of them left to be catching crazy amounts. Perhaps the south end had been fished out and what we were catching were fish who were starting to come down from the north.

2. The day before we came down we had that massive 40° day that melted a lot of snow and caused a lot of slush. It's quite possible the snap temp change cause the fish to spread out throughout the lake.

Just a reminder this was my second and third trip ice fishing so I'm not a huge expert yet. It's easy to tell who I am out on the water I'm the guy with the 1980s scoop style auger. We aren't using electronics yet either. As this is my first season I'm just putting together my gear and figuring out what I want to upgrade for next year. We did buy a 6 ft by 6 ft by 6 ft ice tent which was an awesome purchase. It is one of the insulated models and we found we didn't even need to use a heater inside. I'm not sure when will upgrade but I'll definitely get a motor powered auger and eventually sonar for ice fishing. Because let's be honest without sonar you're just really guessing as to what's going on down there. The big key on a weekend like this would have been to keep moving. However lack of a depth finder and a quick drilling auger will keep you from really wanting to do this.

In all, we had fun. Met a lot of gentleman from the ice fishing and NWFR groups. Shout out to Michael and Donny. A couple of really great guys we had fun chatting with.

What worked:
Perch eyes, grubs
White Mirabou jigs

What didn't work:
40 year old augers
Showing up at 11am

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