Awesome day for me, not so much for the gills...

[Tim Moore]

Well, my plan was to fish in the morning until I had to leave for my 10am class. I did and caught some really nice gills and pumpkinseeds. The bite was on and that was all I thought about during class.

Class ended, I went home and had lunch with the wife, and promptly decided to head back out. I was fishing at the Bellamy Reservoir in Madbury. There is about 8" of slush on top of 10" of good ice and walking is tough. The launch is beat up from wheeler and sled traffic, it will be the first to go for sure. The wind blew about 20mph the whole time but I was inside my Scout TC with the buddy heater running, I couldn't have cared less about the wind.

I ventured out to where I was in the morning and set up over the last hole I fished. I was fishing in 15' of water. The fish were there and stacked up. I proceeded to jig up one gill after another and needed to move only a few times. I caught several 9 1/2" fish. I was using a 4.5mm glow tungsten jig made by Custom Jigs & Spins tipped with white spikes. I did fish with Maki Plastics a bit too but the fish seemed more interested in the spikes. I was more interested in catching big numbers so I stuck with the spikes.

pounding the jig and slowly pulling away from them seemed to drive them crazy. I would pound with a regular cadence and just when I thought they were about to turn off I would start to work it away from them and wham, they would go nuts.

I lost count of how many fish I caught but it was probably my best day this season. There were several crappie (mostly small ones) mixed in. I also filmed the footage for what will be my last ice fishing video diary of the season. I'll get that put together in the next day or two and post a link to it.

[monstermoose78]

Nice work.