My buddy, Josh, and I hit the ice for the first time yesterday. We tried a lake that I haven't fished in ~5 years. Things started off slow, because we weren't on the fish... and we were having some technical difficulties. I fished the first couple hours using a jig that had a tiny bend in the point of the hook that was causing me to miss almost every fish that bit. I checked it after the first few misses, but the hook was so small and the bend was so subtle that I didn't notice it until the 2nd examination when I ran my finger nail along it. Then Josh had to leave to buy a new flasher battery because it turned out that his old battery was shot. We verified that the battery was the problem by hooking my battery up to his flasher. Still, he managed to catch a 19" bass (released) early on before his FL-18 went on the fritz. For all of our problems we didn't miss too much action since the fish (gills and crappies) didn't start hitting well until ~10:30-11:00 AM. They bit steadily until dark, tapering off a bit towards the end... not at all what the solunar tables predicted. The sun coming out didn't seem to affect the fish. However, the bites were very light and short. I was too slow for a lot of them... my spring bobber (the lightest St. Croix, which I had pushed all the way out) usually didn't tick more than 1/8", and there were a lot of up takes. Sometimes my spring didn't even tick... it just started bouncing a little different (i.e. less).
A #14 metallic gold jig with glow red eyes did well, much better than the chartreuse and green I started with. Most fish were caught 9-11' down over 12' of water, with many of them rising up off the bottom into view after I dropped my jig down. I normally had to stop my jig 2' off the bottom, pound the crap out of it to get them interested, and then back my action way off when they got close. Pulling my jig very slowly away from interested parties helped turn the sniffers into biters, and also helped with seeing bites on the spring bobber. All in all, the bite was a little funky. The fish seemed to be roaming around, so a lot of hole hopping was necessary to stay on top of them. I tried to find and focus on holes that already had fish a couple feet off the bottom. For the most part it was one fish here, one fish there... although occasionally they'd hang around long enough to pick 5-6 off. Given the light bite, and usually only catching 1-2 at a time, it sure didn't feel like we killed them. However, at the end of the day, they certainly added up! We didn't get any giants, but the bluegills averaged ~8" with the biggest going 8.75" and the crappies (about 10% of our catch) were all 9-9.5". I also caught a 10" grass pickerel, which was surprising.
Here's what we ended up with:

