Ghosts of Winters Past

2025 was a pretty good ice fishing season in Connecticut. 2026, so far, is even better.... the best in recent memory, in fact. Noah, who doesn't work in the winter anymore, has gotten fully ice obsessed, and that has carried along to me. Going from very casually stepping onto local lakes with a spud bar and one jigging rod to fully shanty-d up with heaters, vexilars, specialized rods and even more specialized jigs, and making spring bobbers at home is a bit of a leap. It was any easy leap for me to take. I'm a fly guy in open water virtually everywhere and every time I can be. With almost no exceptions, if I'm making casts with an artificial offering, I'm going to do so with a fly rod and don't care at all to use anything else. That doesn't operate well when the water is frozen. Walking on water is pretty darn fun. Trotting out on the ice nearly daily and even sleeping out on it has got me thinking about the winters that have passed, though. 

I caught my first fish through the ice not that long ago, in early January of 2018. It was a striped bass. Noah and I both got our first that day, actually. They were on handlines. They fought... poorly. 

That winter of 2017-18 was the first time I ever put even a measurable effort into ice fishing, and it wasn't a huge effort. I did give it a go with jigging panfish and bass and started to at least catch fish. That wasn't an exceptional ice winter, but it was good enough. My most significant memories on the ice that involved attempting to get carp through the ice and even losing a set rod to one, and dropping my phone down a hole and managing to grab it as it sank. The open water opportunities were probably markedly better that winter than the ice opportunities, at least given our lack of skill. That skill lack extended beyond just ice fishing though, Noah and I were both very much still in a developing age in our angling careers- not unskilled, per-se, probably better than average, but growing rapidly. We'd just gotten back from our first Florida trip, which opened our eyes in significant ways. 

I'd ice fished prior to 2018, of course, but in an even more disorganized fashion. In 2017 we had a very mild winter that gave no ice. January and February both presented more opportunities at open water bass, sunfish, and carp than they did at ice fishing. 2016 was much the same. In fact, winters like these have been more abundant in the last two decades than winters like the one we're having now. I can recall falling into a pond in early February of 2010 and it being a complete non-issue. 

My friend Rik and I poked around this snowy but open pond one January day in 2017

2014 was a late winter but cold enough and snowy enough to keep me off a lot of water. I don't know that I ice fished at all, my friend Dalton and I may have half-assedly attempted it. I did more snow-shoeing than fishing that winter, especially from February into early March. What I keenly remember was that shelf ice built up significantly. In combination with deep snowpack and the fact that we still had a short closed trout season back then and it made for a very good spring trout season. Fish were hungry, had been unpressured, and flows were fantastic. The hatches were better back then too. 

I believe it was 2013 that I recall struggling to cut through the thick ice on a local lake with a hatchet, and when I finally did it shot through and I lost it.  

In 2020 and 2021, I did a little bit of ice fishing, but not much. In 22 and 23, hardly any at all. I devoted some days in 24 but the window was short. Ice was largely absent each of those years but so was snow, with little in the way of prolonged snow coverage. So far 2025-26 has provided the longest duration of snow coverage locally that I can remember in a long time. What does that all mean, though? I hope this produces a spring trout fishing boom equivalent to 2013 and 14, but the reality is the streams are open to fish the moment they thaw now, and that closed March really was advantageous back when we still had that. Combined with the boom in popularity of two high impact trout methods- Euro nymphing and especially center pinning, now -the fish won't see the benefit of a deep freeze that they used to in conjunction with a chance to settle into early spring without heavy molestation. At the very least, snowpack melting into the ground a steady pace has significant groundwater benefits. We have a lot on the ground all over the northeast at this point, and all of February to accrue even more. That leaves another question: with snow on the ground all over the Mid Atlantic region, will there be a significantly better striped bass spawn this spring? My suspicion is, no, there will not, at least not enough to make up for the collapse we've seen thus far, but I could be mistaken. Colder winters with more precipitation are indeed tied to improved recruitment. We'll just need to wait and see.

What I'm most excited about, personally, is this: 

https://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/index.html?year=2026&month=1&day=31&units=e&region=Northeast

I anticipate a pretty good spring floodplain season for me... if you've done that fishery with me, you know why that brings a smile to my face. It's the coolest. And with snowpack like we have throughout the watershed, it should be very reliable this spring. Book soon, because late March, April, and May do fill right in! 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, Ryan, Dar, Eric, Truman, and Collin for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.