Ice Conditions

[zachp]

Must be about 2 to 3 feet of ice up here at Prudhoe Bay...

[nluchau]

Oh geez Zach. Rub it in a bit would ya Geesh

[Rick]

Thanks for the update Zach.

But do you know how the ice fishing is going. Pics would be cool too

[TommyJ33]

yeah and I drove to work in a thunderstorm to day in Minneapolis.

[zachp]

It's been a couple years since i've ice fished up here. The main fish through the ice for me was rainbow trout and arctic char, if i found the right spot i couldn't keep them off the hook, but it was mostly smaller fish in the .5 to 1.5 lb range, I only caught a couple fish over 2 lbs. Bait was salmon eggs or shrimp, no minnows. It was a lot of fun but one thing i never understood was there are few Alaskans who ice fish. I lived 35 miles north of Anchorage in a town called Wasilla, there were a lot of lakes to fish, but only a few i could get to due to not having a snowmobile. The Temperature was for the most part similar to MN, one thing i never liked was the few hours of daylight in December and January which I didn't fish because the fish didn't bite before or after dark. Ice thickness at it's peak was 2.5 to 3.5 feet, and for the amount of outdoorsmen up here i figured the lakes would be packed, but very seldom was i ever on a lake with another fisherman. A few occasions when i was out fishing and there were others on the lake they would come up to me and ask me what type of electronics i was using...(it was a vexilar) no ice fishermen had ever used them up there, most had never even heard of them.

Since then i've moved back to MN/ND and fly back and forth to work in the oil field up in northern AK. It was a good experience up there, but i never thought it compared to the ice fishing in MN. I might have some pics in the archives, i will look for them and post them if i find any.

[Chuckster]

The best part is that I get to use all of Zachs new toys he buys while he is home when he goes back to work

[zachp]

I need to get that key back. (da)

[al jr]

My dad was down from alaska for thanksgiving, he said lakes in his area, palmer, had about 12+ inches of ice already. No fishing report though. Zach what lakes did you fish near wasilla? my mom lives on Rainbow lake. My brothers have cought some real nice rainbows through the ice in years past.

[zachp]

The ones i can remember are Kepler/Bradley, Irene, Matanuska, Lucille, and a couple lakes up in the Willow area which i don't remember their names. I don't recall ever hearing about Rainbow...must be a lake that doesn't get stocked, i basically used the fish and game web site and looked for stocked lakes in the area and fished them. After i fished all winter and didn't have a whole lot of luck I found out from a co-worker that lives on a lake by Wasilla that he'd go out right in his back yard and catch rainbows all day from 1 to 3 lbs, oh well...live and learn.

[mjhowe]

ZachP,

So we are talking mostly trout, grayling, char etc right? Panfish in AK are trout under 3#'s, right?

No Perch, or eye's, northerns, etc... nothing like that I assume?

[zachp]

The most similar thing to panfish would be the Greyling because of their smaller size, a good size greyling caught in a lake would be 11 to 14 inches. One thing that you had to look out for was the lakes that were stocked with landlocked salmon, these salmon would be from 4 to 9 inches and reminded me a lot of the small perch we catch in MN lakes, there'd be so many of them under the hole you could not fish it cuz they'd take the shrimp off the hook before i could get it 5 feet down below the ice.

There are a lot of lakes in AK with pike in them. I never fished any lake with them in it though, i think they're more plentiful in the interior part of the state. I have heard of the natives catching pike in the winter that are over 30 Lbs, but to most of them that just means you get a bigger fillet.

One other thing i wanted to fish for was Lake Trout, there are some hogs up here but the lakes closest to me that had them in it would have needed a wheeler or snowmobile to get around and i had neither. There's also a lot of lakes with big eel pout in them, I talked to a guy that used to fish for them with the alaskan tip up which was tieing some braided line to a chunk of wood and throwing the wood about 10 feet from the hole, when they'd see the wood start rolling they'd know there was a fish there.