I've been out recently, trying to catch a few Panfish from some of our more pressured areas during the annual "hard, white water" season. One of the special techniques I've been experimenting with this year is the use of attractors and appetite stimulants to:
1) Attract Panfish into your area, when the fishing is hard and the fish aren't too frisky, and;
2) Get them to bite on your bait or lure, particularly when they've apparently seen it all before, and developed what appears to be a permanent case of lock-jaw.
I've been lucky enough this year to be involved in a couple of new developments in the "ice fishing attractors & feeding stimulator's" scene. Since January I've been helping Larry Kirchner test his new Bait Flare attractor, and I've been working with Attila Agh of TopMix USA, on a complete line of feeding stimulant groundbaits. It's been interesting and fun to work through all the various combinations and options, and although I feel like I've a long way to go, I've already experienced som interesting results to share with you.
One of the toughest bites at this time of the year is when you are chasing pressured Panfish across relatively featureless bays or flats. We've got to that time of the year when the weed is generally breaking down, and thus pulling oxygen out of the water, making extensive weedbeds an unhealthy option for Panfish to hole up in. So, we are reduced to tracking Panfish across the less weeded areas of bays and flats, but these are also relatively featureless and difficult to hold fish in your fishing area. Once you've found them, you not only have to hold them of course, you also have to convince them to bite!
Eric and I were out experimenting today. We fished a fairly large bay, with a constant depth of around 3 feet under the ice, small lumps of rotting weed, and a reputation for being a tough bite during the middle of the day. What seems to happen here is what I've found happening on a lot of similar flat, featureless areas; the fish are moving relatively fast, very hard to hold, and almost impossible sometimes to hook!
What worked for us today was one of Larry's Bait Flares; this turned a fishless wasteland (according to my underwater camera when we started) into the fishy equivalent of a fast-food restaurant; we definitely had some "drive-by" action within a few minutes of the Bait Flare going in! Of course, such a shallow area (3 feet isn't exactly a deep spot) wasn't ideal for Larry's Bait Flares, which I think need around 6-10 feet of water to really do their thing (they are quite explosive, and will pull fish from some distance), so I wasn't exactly sure what to do after the first fish were caught and their buddies dropped back away from us. Quite clearly the Bait Flare had done it's work, and we'd attracted some fish; what we now needed was something that would really stimulate their appetites?
Time to turn to Attila's latest "prototype" stimulants. Sure enough, one of the lightest, most active of these (added to the water via a mini-Tiger Feeder) seemed to turn the Panfish into eating mode. Instead of small Perch, we started intercepting some good-sized Bluegills; the biggest one even tried to pull a rod off its rest! Small mainly Pink jigs worked, with surprisingly large waxies and spikes; it seemed that the combination of Bait Flare (attractor) to start, and then a regular but small amount of Top Mix feeding stimulant was just the ticket for curing the lock-jaw problem. Instead of struggling just to get a bite from a tiny Perch by careful jigging with ultra-small jigs and a single spike or piece of micro-plastic, we were able to keep triggering bites from good Panfish with sensible sized jigs and baits. Every time the fish backed off from under our holes, a small application of stimulant inside a mini-Tiger Feeder down the target hole was enough to bring them back to us... with a healthy appetite in each case!
To sum up, I really think it's worth trying these new approaches, particularly if you are struggling to keep feeding fish under your holes, and not wandering off under the ice to your neighbors. If you need more information, please contact me about Attila's Top Mix feeding stimulants (
here's his current website, and he has a new e-commerce website coming soon), and here's the link to Larry's
YouTube video on the Bait Flare. Please ask me if you want more information on the "how to" of fishing with attractors and stimulants; this is a tricky subject, and there's not a lot of information out there at the moment... maybe I should write a detailed article on the subject! :o)
Tight Lines!
