Ice Fishing

A bit over two weeks ago (around the 10th of January) I went ice fishing for the first time ever. Not a big production--just grabbed my spinning stuff, my lures and headed out hoping to find some holes cut. I met two nice guys who had already cut 20 holes and gave it a try. No luck.

So I went back a few days later--with shiners. And that worked:
Caught two Pickerel. One came home for dinner.

Last weekend I tried again without bait and was skunked again. So this time, yesterday, the 27th, I tried with shiners again. It was very slow fishing, but after almost three hours, I finally caught a really nice 12"calico. Then I had two more bites I missed--probably more of the same.

There was an interesting hatch evident on the pond:

After it tapered off around 2:30 I decided to take the two remaining live shiners to head for the stream. I had never used live bait in a stream before. I mean it is almost heretical. I felt sheepish with the first trout on a spinner last March. Well, there's no going back. I'm a sinner for life.

Well, that worked! I caught a trout! It was in the "upper" pool, but when I landed it I instantly recognized the fish--it was one I had caught at least once if not twice before--in the lower pool. The photographic record proves it. Unfortunately for this fish, I used a #2 hook. I had been on a #8 but lost two dead shiners to him on that hook. I saw it in the water taking them. So I figured that maybe the hook point wasn't catching it.  Well, it got it in the eye, so I took it home. This is the 2nd fish I've caught on #2 and both times they've been impaled in the eye.

Compare this one from December 27th:

To this one from yesterday (January 27th):

And the starboard side from December:

And from yesterday:

You can see the exact same markings.


I harvested the fish and it was very good.

But more interesting was that it had a full stomach--and not merely from one of the earlier shiners. It seems to have been eating what are possibly case caddis:

 

Compared to some of the other stocked trout, this one seems to have had the right genes to become a wild fish. Some of the others had completely empty stomachs a month after stocking, or were eating hemlock leaves. So this has me thinking about the whole stocked trout business. How do they maintain genetic diversity?

I've read with great interest about the Farmington Survivor Strain program. That makes a lot of sense. But it must be expensive. I know that regular adult trout stocking is one of the most expensive stocking programs around--about $4 per fish I read somewhere concerning Michigan. What does it cost to do the Farmington approach? And if we did that in other rivers, could we transition to natural reproduction, or is there just way too much pressure?