I did some more hiking on a popular Steuben County lake on Saturday in hopes of finding some new, out of the way spots. I used Google Earth to get the coordinates and created waypoints on my fishfinder's built in GPS. I went to the 1st spot, drilled a hole, and found 14' of water with weeds and fish... exactly what I was hoping for. I'd never used the GPS functionality before, so I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was. I drilled several more holes and put together a nice mess. I did hook some sort of lake monster that I fought for a couple minutes before the hook came out. When I first set the hook all I felt was weight. I gently lifted my rod, and then the fish made a short run until I backed off. It's almost like the fish didn't realize that it was hooked until I put some pressure on it. I would have loved to have seen what it was! I checked out a couple more spots during mid day, but they didn't pan out. I hardly marked anything at either one, so I walked back to the first spot and put several more in the sack. The area had become quite slushy, and there was ~1.5" of standing water in places. I sat my fishfinder down a couple of times, and it started floating! Other times I tried to drop dinks back down the hole only to have them swim above the ice and get stuck in the slush. The color of the jigs I was using didn't seem to be critical, but size was. I had to use the smallest jigs in my box. It was so windy that I had to put a split shot on to get them down. The bites were generally super light, although some fish rocketed up and smashed my offerings. I constantly had to switch up my jigging action to figure out how to get a particular fish to react... couldn't really pattern them. Most of the time a slow rise and fall about 1' above the weeds called them in.
Saturday's mess:

I took a couple friends up there on Sunday afternoon, but the bite was quite tough and the average size was down. Eventually we figured out that jigging in the 8-11' range, well above the weeds, called in the most active fish. We totaled 27 eaters in about 3.25 hours. The wind was still howling when we left.
Saturday's mess:

I took a couple friends up there on Sunday afternoon, but the bite was quite tough and the average size was down. Eventually we figured out that jigging in the 8-11' range, well above the weeds, called in the most active fish. We totaled 27 eaters in about 3.25 hours. The wind was still howling when we left.
