How to Jig for River Trout Can be Complicated

When I parked, the temperature was 65, and I felt confident it would remain high as I fished, possibly even provoke some of those rainbows in the spot to hit, along with the stimulus of the approaching front. I wasn't exactly raring to go. I didn't like the long walk through a large farmer's field, but I covered the distance pretty quickly, getting over-warmed in the process. 

I wanted to try one of my new NRC Creek Bugz, but I decided to leave the eighth-ounce Kalin's marabou jig on the hook, since it worked so well last time. Pretty soon, I hooked something heavy that began heading downriver, and then I lost it, feeling I had just lost a tank of a trout, but once I had reeled the jig in, I saw a scale on the hook, so I figured I had snagged an oversize sucker. 

I lost my jig and tied on an NRC (photographed above). Fishing one of them, I think, is a little more complicated than an eighth-ounce or sixteenth-ounce marabou. I mounted it on a 32nd-ounce jig head, and though I felt it cast pretty far, I couldn't get it close to the far bank as I did with the eighth-ounce jig, and with the heavy wind this afternoon, controlling the retrieve wasn't as easy. 

It's a much slower, plodding retrieve. It seems as if you can keep it near bottom without getting snagged nearly as often as you do with an eighth ounce. I retrieved the eighth-ounce jig fairly fast by comparison, and I was still getting hung up a lot. The water is pretty deep in the area of the long stretch I fished, too. Maybe one of the main advantages of fishing an eighth ounce is getting it across the river.

I hooked and lost a pretty nice trout last time I fished the stretch by having got the jig near the opposite bank and having just begun the retrieve. But today, I got hit once on my side of the mid-river. I had lost the NRC to a snag and tied on another eighth-ounce jig. It was a definite strike with a shaken-up series of pulls, and it came on the eighth-ounce jig and its faster retrieve. 

I've been told by a more experienced river trout fisherman not to fish that way. That an eighth ounce is way too heavy for the rivers during winter, but I keep getting hit and I usually catch trout. I think most of my river trout have hit that size, rather than jigs of a sixteenth ounce. Some advice is good, and I think I have yet to see if my friend's enthusiasm for NRC pays off in more catches for me.

But sometimes advice just doesn't work out. You need to follow up with and stick to your own way, as curious as you may be about someone else's. Fishing does have to do with hard fact, but there's enough leeway to allow for confidence in certain presentations to lead the way forward for any given angler. Cold water trout will hit a jig that has to be retrieved at at least a moderate retrieve.

They're that active in the winter. Think of all the smallmouth bass in our rivers and that they don't show up in winter catches. It's not the marabou they don't like. They're off the feed in general, because they don't hit NRC baits retrieved much slower, either. They do have to feed on occasion, but trout remain a lot more active than bass do. When its very cold out trout get hard to catch, though.

The temperature was falling fast. When I did get back to the car, it was 57. In the meantime, I felt disappointed the warmth didn't stay with me. I had switched to a sixteenth-ounce marabou--all of the marabou besides one a friend gave me are black--and hooked something that began fighting hard. In the water I saw brown and believed I had snagged another sucker, not hooked a brown trout.

It wouldn't have been impossible, but unlikely. As you can see in the photo, the sucker got hooked in the tail. It was fun fighting a fish to the bank. I had forgotten my net. I unhooked the fish and released it back into the river. Suckers are an integral part of the river's ecology, rather than really being any nuisance as carp can seem to be. As if, just maybe, carp disrupt the spawning of bass. Not sure.

I would have stayed longer and have tried harder yet to catch a trout today, but for the second time, my line came doubled up off the spool and knotted up. So much was lost, I wouldn't have been able to cast effectively, so I quit. Sometimes, to catch river stockers, you do need to double down. Next time, I'll try again. Trying to remember to use the jigs my friend Oliver gave me. 

Last Time

 

Ice Unsafe to Walk on Having Melted From Underneath

Gray instead of white.

I rode up to Mount Hope Pond with a bucket of shiners and fatheads, hoping for nice trout, pickerel, and bass. With 280 trout stocked into 18 surface acres of water, it's a possibility. Of course I knew I might find the ice unsafe, but I really expected it wouldn't be just yet. Again, I pulled into the large parking lot as I did once earlier in the ice season, and within seconds the pond came into view. It didn't look good. That gray off-color, rather than white, signaled to me that I probably wasn't staying here long. I quickly decided to first approach the pond with just my splitting bar. That no one else fished it, and Fridays might draw more anglers than other weekdays do, was also a definite sign that things weren't good. 

Of course, I had to check it out. And I stepped out on the ice a couple of feet from the beach, my feet getting moist because my waterproof boots aren't living up to that description, and I need to try to repair or replace them. Then I reached forward and whacked my way through the ice with two thrusts of my splitting bar. I did this repeatedly out of curiosity, but there was no hope. Three inches on top was slush, and maybe three or four inches underneath rotted out. 

I'm getting older and forgetful, it's true. How many times I've walked a plank to get onto a lake over the melt at the edge late in the ice season, I don't recall, but if I had had a plank, I might have walked it, and then tested the ice, say, eight feet from the edge of the beach. Then, I might have found hope existed yet. 

It's interesting to me how, quite apparently, the ice melts from underneath. I noticed what clearly seemed to be the phenomenon at Lake Aeroflex two days ago, when, by all we could judge, the ice had melted about four inches from underneath, having been a foot thick Thursday the week before. I only hedge from certain judgment because I want some peer review to back up what I've seen. Here, too. With three inches of slush and four inches of striated rot underneath, that's a total of seven inches. Oliver Round was up here a week ago when it was 15 inches thick.

That rot is a curiosity. I always refer to the striations, but most people speak of honeycombing. I recall once being out on Lake Hopatcong with my son when things began to get sketchy. This was almost two decades ago. The surface was soft, there was about four inches of striated ice, and three or four inches of hard ice underneath that rot, so I considered the ice safe and we fished. But if it melts from underneath, as it clearly seems to, why wasn't it striated all the way through? And besides, how do warmer temps permeate cold, hard ice to rot it down towards that surface underneath? 

I've paid attention to many ice conditions over the decades, but I've never noticed until two days ago that ice seems to thin out from underneath. I've seen plenty of that striated rot--which proves much of the whole mass is affected by the melt--but I've never had the opportunity to measure such differences as a foot and eight inches, 15 inches and about seven inches, as these recent outings have afforded me.  

My splitting bar head was welded onto the iron shaft, a cut having accommodated that chisel head.

Mount Hope Pond Revisited

 

Father and Son Who Know How to Ice Fish

Naturally Oliver and I hit the ice confidently after last week. Nothing was happening after an hour or two, but I still felt confident. Despite my persistent feeling for the back of the lake, where there's not such pressure on the fish. We took position where we saw salmon caught last time, and also set a few devices where we caught the bass and lost the pickerel. 

Someone who Oliver and I had seen in the distance down lake came in. As he was about to pass by, I asked how he did.

"I set up over the deep water and got no hits from salmon or trout after four hours. So I moved into the weeds and caught a bunch of pickerel. None of them were good-sized, though."

Soon a father and son arrived. They proved to be some of the most knowledgeable ice fishermen I've spoken to. Oliver spoke to them independently of me, and he nailed it when he told me, "Goes to show what ice fishing a lake repeatedly, results in." 

True. But Oliver didn't mean that in any derogatory sense, and even if they only fish here, they're good. When they set three Jaw Jackers in shallow water right near the bank of three or four feet, possibly a little deeper if three or four feet is just the top of the weeds, I thought they didn't know what they were doing. I had set tip-ups near the bank but not that near--in eight and five feet of water closer to the steep drop-off than the bank. Within 15 minutes, they had a fish I thought at first was a pickerel, then bass...but I swore the fish looked like a trout. When the second fish got caught from the same hole, Oliver swore it was a trout. Soon we talked to them, and, yes, the fish were trout. They had set six other devices, pretty much all in very shallow weeds, and the son jigged.

In the middle of all this, Oliver and I still waiting on our fatheads and shiners, a bald eagle showed up. It took position in a tree. I approached with my 70-200mm zoom on my Niko D850, and before I could get a shot to crop, it flew off. The father told me, "It wants the trout. It'll be back."

A few other ice fishermen left the lake, all of them apparently skunked. I assume so because we watched whenever one of them tended his tip-ups. No fish. And I later learned the father and son had given another the two trout. And we never saw him catch any. 

Oliver had to leave at 5:00 and he left fishless. I stayed on into dusk, leaving the lot perhaps a little after 6:00. In the meantime, the eagle returned twice, and the second time, the son had caught another trout--they had three in total, lost some hits, and lost something big that "might have been a pickerel," according to the father. 

The son tossed the trout away from him onto the ice. The eagle swooped low, extended talons forward, and took the gift.   

 

Cronk's First Ice Since Boyhood