To Recruit or Move... Big Panfish on Big Water!

Without a doubt, mobility is an important card when trying to find and catch fish through the ice; on any body of water. Undoubtedly, those big moves find fish and small moves catch fish. You can also bet that you have to spend time working a hole to determine what the fish want and whether there are any fish below you. The balance of whether to stay put and fish, or pick up the auger and move is a precarious gamble. You can get burned by moving too much and burned if you don't move enough.

On many big lakes with open basins, panfish, especially perch; will wander the basin transitions gorging themselves on the invertebrates that live there. Freshwater shrimp, insect larvae, blood worms and a host of other bugs provide the smorgasbord to grow big panfish on big expanses of water like North Dakota's Devils Lake. The vastness of the open lake basin provides safety from larger predators like northern pike, walleyes and even people. Hard to find and catch in such a big open place.

Yes, you have to move around to find them and you have to drop a lure down and use your electronics to determine if there are fish in the area. Marcum, Zercom, Vexilar, are all excellent ice tools; these units will show you fish. The Vexilar, however, excels at revealing "movement" and looking for this movement is the key to finding fish in deep water.

Many anglers confuse target or bottom separation with the ability to find fish but separation just makes it easier to distinguish what that fish is doing when it is on your bait. The easy to distinguish separation on the FL-18's zoom mode excels, after fish are found, and you are trying to catch them. When you are looking and trying to determine if there are any fish around, you need to concentrate on the actual bottom signal itself, and watch for fluttering or movement. Because, you don't get any kind of separation signal from a fish, in thirty plus feet of water, if the fish is five feet away from your lure.

To see these fish that are in your cone angle, but not directly beneath you enough to separate from the bottom, you need to be able to look into the bottom reading itself. The ability to pick up this movement in the bottom is what has made the Vexilar line of flashers, "kings of the ice," too many in the fishing electronics world. Whether you are walleye fishing above a rocky uneven bottom that hides fish within the bottom or perch fishing over a deep mud bottom, being able to look within the bottom is the key to determining whether there are any fish present long before they come up and investigate your lure.

Understanding your electronics is important in basing your decisions on whether to move or stay. On so many big basin lakes where bottom orientated panfish roam, the school might be spread out over a large area and the schools often seem to be made up of pods of fish rather than on large mass. These fish often seem to come through in waves. Whether or not these waves of perch that cruise through decide to bite and the frequency of these waves often determine how many perch you catch.

The frequency of these waves of fish moving beneath you is something you can sometimes control, and many anglers don't realize this. When fish reveal themselves on the electronics, everybody fishes. When those fish leave, and the bottom reading on the Vexilar just becomes a still band of red, many people quit fishing but this is actually when you should be fishing harder.

What do we mean by fishing harder? You often need to fish differently when there are no fish present. You need to try to bring fish to you. Hard shakes, higher lift-falls, work the lure hard to try to get the attention of fish that might be passing by ten or fifteen feet to the side of your bait. As fish move towards you to investigate, the bottom reading on the Vexilar will begin to flutter, now its time to back off on the hard stuff and start fishing again with the holds, little shakes and small hops that often trigger panfish. Learn to fish differently when there are no fish around in an attempt to bring fish to you rather than always choosing to make the move. Then learn to switch gears and figure out what the fish want as they close the distance.

Oftentimes, in today's ice fishing circles, mobility is pounded into our heads. When fish leave the hole we are fishing, we are supposed to leave. You can drill holes and try to find the fish that just left you or you can sit and pull the next wave of fish from beneath you. Usually, the best days we have on the ice are the days where we can sit over one hole and recruit new waves of perch underneath us.

The recruitment of new fish into your hole can really be the most determining factor. If a new wave of fish come beneath you every half hour, and you can tally a few fish each time before you loose them, you will end up with a decent catch. More often than not, during a tough bite, you are better off staying in the zone, keeping your line in the water and working the fish hard rather than chasing the greener pasture that might not exist. In the 2001 Trap Attack on Devils Lake, Randy Grulke from Watertown, Wisconsin, won the event and took home the wood by doing just the opposite of what many of the anglers he was competing against did. He stayed in one spot that had good fish movement and worked them.

On many of the big bodies of water that boast big panfish, the game isn't usually a numbers game, where you are going to catch a lot of fish, but rather the fish you do catch can be giants. There are many lakes where you can catch a hundred bluegills, crappies or perch in a day, but they are going to be stunted, hungry fish confined to a small area. When you are targeting the bulls, slabs and pigs of the panfish world, fifteen of these specimens in one outing are considered to be a great day of fishing.

Editor's Note: The author, Jason Mitchell, an Ice Team Power Stick and fixture on Devils Lake, home to some of the best ice fishing in North America, is also a member of North Dakota's famed Perch Patrol Guide Service. For more information on Devils Lake's famous winter angling opportunities, contact the Perch Patrol Hotline at, 701-DL1-FISH.

Top Photo: The author, Jason Mitchell, of the Perch Patrol Guide Service with a pair of slabs. Middle Photo: Two Perch Patrol clients show off some of their catch after spending their day recruiting or working their baits aggressively until the bottom reading on the Vexilar began to flutter...got'em! Bottom Photo: Large basin lakes like Devils Lake grow enormous panfish because of abundant food and habitat for fish to roam and hide from predators.