I spent another weekend ice fishing on Lake Superior. We started out on the North Shore on the Minnesota side with no results. This ice was sketchy.

Drew pops the first hole.

In previous weeks the shipping was still active resulting in lots of ice breaking and re-freezing. This was a mess for travel, and you had to be cautious. If you look in the background of the above photo you will see all of the steam, this is rising off of open water. We were venturing further that direction at first light when the ice structure changed (not realizing how near we were to the open water). I stopped and checked it with my chisel. It took no more than 2 hits to pop through the 2″ or less so we quickly backtracked onto the thicker ice where we setup. No fish resulted in this adventure but we did get a nice sunrise over the wall of steam coming off the main lake.

Treacherous Ice Field

Sun, steam cloud, and ice field.

The next day I jumped in the car with Joel and we headed over the Wisconsin near the Apostle islands. We went out of Bayfield and setup on a break from 30 to 60 feet of water. Joel managed a couple of nice lake trout on his secret jig.

Joel with dinner (and his homemade gaff using a 10/0 catfish hook).

Since I was not catching anything I decided to move shallow and fished a 5 foot break closer to shore. I cut myself a nice big viewing hole so I could look down and watch. It was a good thing I moved because I ended up catching a small splake and two really nice brown trout. (one of which is seen in previous post). Our friends Kevin and Chris were fishing a little ways away and wound up with a lake trout, some coho salmon and herring. All together it was a nice mixed bag of fish. One thing I love about ice fishing on Lake Superior is that you never know what all you might catch and often end up getting several different tasty species.

A mixed bag – brown trout, lake trout, coho salmon, and herring.

Leif, Joel, Kevin and Chris with their Lake Superior fish.

You may have noticed that the two browns were male and female. Well the female was full of eggs which makes for an excellent bait when all else fails.

Brown Trout Eggs

It kind of looks like these beads hmm?