Litton's Fishing Lines: Circle Hooks for Ice Fishing

Friday, January 24, 2025

Circle Hooks for Ice Fishing

Today I played out a fish better than many in this pond, and I thoroughly enjoyed the give-and-take on the Dacron, not having played one on it for three years. Just minutes ago, I uploaded an ice fishing video to my Litton's Fishing Lines YouTube channel, and I checked the date. February 14, 2021. I remember it crystal clear. My wife and I had just bought the Honda I drive. I made an issue of my spending Valentine's Day that way, and she made an issue of making sure I went.

That fish, not surprisingly, turned out to be a pickerel of just slightly under 18 inches. I know that, because I took it home. The moment it came through the hole, it came through dripping blood. That pissed me off, and I immediately vowed to stop at Dick's on the way home for circle hooks.

Recently, I read a Chris Pierra post on Facebook, and his persuasion of the use of circle hooks ice fishing all but convinced me. Old habits die hard, and I've used plain shank size 6 Mustad hooks since I used to buy them by the loose dozens at Brunswick Sports and Hardware of Trenton in 1975. I went online and saw expensive options as expected, but really, size 6 circles hooks for 90 cents apiece? It's obscene.

What convinced me was seeing the blood on the fish as I lifted it out of the pond. Yes, my wife wants me to bring home more fish. I don't have to remind her about the Y bones until later. Maybe I'll divulge in a later post whether or not I was able to remove them. Patience, patience. A lot on my plate and the pickerel won't be much!

Pickerel have white flesh and a mild flavor. Old Bay seasoning will be interesting cooked into it. But I release almost all the fish I catch. All I can say in favor of taking a fairly nice pickerel is two things. For one, most of the pickerel here are smaller. They might be stunted. Harvesting some might help the size increase. And secondly, there's less competition against the bass population.

Oliver out-fished me again. When we fished with Cronk and Kevin Glenn the other day, Oliver caught the most fish, though Kevin caught the larger pickerel and perhaps the larger perch. Today Oliver caught three pickerel, his biggest slightly shorter than mine perhaps, lost a hook to another, while I missed a hit, and had fish take four shiners and fatheads from me.

What happened that's very interesting is that on two or three tip-ups, Oliver set fatheads only two feet under the ice on his beloved Jaw Jackers. Something got one of them. It could have been a perch, but then again, maybe it really was a trout.

Why pickerel cruise around out in the middle of the pond, far from the bottom of the sharp shoreline drop-offs down to 15 feet, beats me. But they did exactly the same in the Princeton Day School pond I fished during my youth.

I got to Dick's, where the smallest circle hooks are size 1/0 and a little more than 50 cents each, which is really expensive. Why someone doesn't compete by producing cheaper bronzed hooks that will rust out easily if they DO gut hook, which is possible, when they would be sharp enough...they don't have to be chemically sharpened and all that expensive jazz, beats me.

At first, I figured 1/0 is way too big. But I gave two different brands of the hooks a careful look, and decided the ones that are a dollar less expensive per pack will do fine on large shiners, and they'll work for Yum Dingers during summer, too. A 1/0 J hook would be too big and heavy for shiners, and for Yum Dinger's I've been using size 2 plain shanks that look bigger than the 1/0 circles at Dick's. Oliver's using circle hooks of about 1/0 on his Jaw Jackers, and he has no trouble catching pickerel as little as 12 inches. That said, I do want to find smaller ones of size 6 or at least size 4. And I really would like to find a reasonable price, but tonight I didn't feel bad when I squandered 10 dollars of my very hard-earned money.