bosco

Honestly, it was luck. I'd heard that they cruise under the ice looking for smelt so I just spread them out randomly with 15' being my deepest. It was also freezing and terribly windy/drifty so I spent most of my day cleaning holes and didn't spend much time refining things once I got everything in the drink. On the vex, everything was on the bottom but it looked like schools of smelt. We downsided bigtime to try an catch some. We'd get tiny little ticks but nothing on. We also jigged the bottom with raps, kastmasters, etc, to no avail.

It came on a tip up 8’ below the ice over 40fow. We had 8 tip ups out between 5’-15’ under the ice. That was the only flag we had all day.

Thank you. I said Brown, my brother said LLS. Tail and mouth told me Brown. Very few spots below the lateral line and orange fillets told him LLS. I'm a walleye guy and it was my first time on Hemlock. I was going for Salmon but I won't complain.

I know THAT!!! I meant male or female.

So is anyone 100% sure on what this one is?

We went out of the south end launch yesterday and it was clearly NOT good everywhere. We trekked north until we got to where this wind blown chunkiness began. There was a huge East/West crack on the north side of that, also. So we knew we couldn’t get any further than 40 fow on this day. A couple guys that arrived after us tried spudding through, and eventually got around it, but they were REALLY determined and spudded their way almost all the way to shoreline in order to get around it. In the end, they didn’t get more than 150 yards north of where we were fishing (which tells me that either they knew exactly where they wanted to fish and we’re willing to go through a heck of a lot of extra effort to get that 150 yards…or that they simply couldn’t get any further north). Meanwhile, the snow blew and drifted hard all morning and almost completely covered the visual warnings mentioned earlier. Another guy came out later and was walking right past us in an effort to get out to where the other guys were. He, having no idea of the extra effort and precautions those earlier guys took to get out there, simply saw people out there and figured it was safe to walk straight out to them. I yelled to him to stop and trotted over to him to explain that it was unsafe and the extent to which those other guys went to get out there. He had no spud bar and decided 40 fow was good enough for him too. So there’s the lesson. People here can graciously share what they believe to be accurate conditions (and we thank you) but it may not be accurate. You can look with your own eyes and perceive what you believe to be true…but even that, also, may not be true. You owe it to yourself to know for yourself…first hand. By the way….we froze our arses off but finished with just 1 fish, a beautiful 24” LLS.

They're still hitting. No ice on the horizon, open water, and temps in the 40's meant I had to get the boat out. Kept just a dozen of the biggest ones. Of the three times I've been out I'm noticing that the dinks have largely disappeared. If the ice sets up it's going to be an awesome season.

Yeah...I was originally going to try last year's plan and shoot for Erie / Chautauqua. Last year on Friday night 12 mph winds were enough to force me to hug the break wall in my 16 footer on Erie and I only got 1. Next night (Saturday night) with even stronger winds forecast I decided I'd better just put in at Chautauqua and got 6. 1 pig, 2 eaters, and 3 shorts. But as the forecast starting to get dialed in a few days ago I decided on Honeoye. Close to home, small body of water. Wind wouldn't affect me too much. But when the hourly temps on weather.com reached out as far as Saturday AM, I saw that and said "nope". Probably wouldn't be a very enjoyable night. If I had a bigger boat and was down with trolling, maybe. But my boat is small and I hate dredging for fish. Especially Walleye.