The First Pickerel of the Year

It has been warm enough to help in melting some of the ice off of the ponds, and to improve things even more we got a bunch of rain last night. That meant that some of the stream fed ponds here had open water. I have never caught anything other than salmonids in February before and today I decided to break that streak. I fished the Bell Pond first, hoping for either a walleye or a pickerel, but that did not pan out. I could have stuck around but it just didn't feel right. So I said goodbye to Bell and went to the pickerel pond.

 I was a little bit disappointed to see that about 80% of the pond still had, but it didn't take me long to figure out that banging the ice shelves with flashy streamers was dynamite. I hooked 5 pickerel, and lost one nice one that bit through the leader. The first four were pencils, they all cane from the stream inlet. But the last wasn't quite as small, more like a hammer handle. It destroyed the Double Deceiver in the two foot wide margin between the shore and the ice. It exploded on the surface, bursting out from under the ice and actually shattering it. A few small chunks actually got thrown onto shore! It's amazing to see fish acting so aggressive in 33 degree water!

The fish exploded out right next to that blue piece of plastic.