Winnibigoshish I.C.E. Series / Cutfoot Sioux January 20-22, 2006 Competition weekend!! The first IceLeaders I.C.E. Series event of 2006 was scheduled for Saturday, January 21 on Lake Winnibigoshish in northern Minnesota. I fished this event last winter and took second place. You bet I was hoping for a repeat this year but the competition was going to be stiff.

Not wanting to go into the tournament blind, I headed up to Winni on Friday to do a little pre-fishing. The I.C.E. Series tournaments this winter are a team format and my dad Randy would be partnering up with me. My dad wasn't able to join me for prefishing so all the weight was on my shoulders. It didn't take me very long out on the mid-lake humps to realize this competition was going to be tough. The fish were not cooperating. Winni is famous for its perch fishing and I was after the perch to start. I augered a countless number of holes before I finally found some active perch, and very nice ones at that. I continued to find a few more locations with active perch and marked those waypoints in my GPS. We would hit these spots up for the tournament. As the sun started to drop, I moved up onto the top of the humps to try and catch a few walleyes and ended up with a few nice ones before I headed in. After pre-fishing, I didn't have much confidence going into the tournament. The perch were being very tight lipped and I didn't manage any incidental walleyes while perch fishing. The morning of the tournament, we awoke to temperatures dropping to -9 degrees. Brrr.... This was quite the shock from the previous day in which I was able to fish outside and hole hop quite comfortably. Dad & I strategized the night before and the plan was to hit a couple of my better perch spots and get 5 jumbo perch right away and then move up and jig for some walleyes. If we were able to get a few 'eyes, we would be on the lookout for a big eelpout and northern. Unfortunately, the game plan stalled out with the perch. We could not catch decent perch to save our life and only ended up weighing 3 perch for a total of 1.6 pounds. The winning weight came in a little over 10 pounds so we were way off the mark. A nice northern pike ended up being required to even place.

So after two very tough days of fishing Lake Winnibigoshish, we decided to fish a different lake with a few other FishingMinnesota ProStaffers. We headed over to Cutfoot Sioux with Paul Waldowski, Rick Paquin, Brian Rogers, Brandon Kime, and Deitz Deittrich to chase after some panfish. Funny how a difference a day can make because the panfish on Cutfoot were willing to cooperate with us. On my very first drop, I had a bluegill come 3 feet off the bottom and smack my bait. It was a nice gill too. A couple different techniques were working to catch the bluegills. One was to sit and wait for a school to come through and the other was to hole hop in search of active fish. When fishing gills, I like to move around and locate fish with my Marcum LX-3. If there are fish present in the hole, I'll drop my lure down. Today, I was using a Custom Jigs & Spins Ratfinkee in chartreuse color tipped with a couple Eurolarvaes. The Ratfinkee/Eurolarvae is one of my favorite panfish combos.

The highlight of the day was when Brian Rogers (BDR) and myself caught bluegills within 30 seconds of each other that both went 10" long. The 10" bluegill is very elusive and it was amazing that we landed them back to back. In fact, Brian was yelling at me to come over to take a picture of him with his fish when I said I had to land mine first. To my amazement, the biggest bluegill of my life pops out of the hole and we were able to get a photo of the 2 of us with our largest bluegills ever. Along with some very nice bluegills in the 8 1/2 - 9 1/2" range, we were also treated to some crappies in the 11-12" range as well with a few sumo perch thrown in the mix. What an awesome day of panfishing!! So what started as a very tough fishing weekend turned into quite the trip! You just have to keep at it and if the fishing isn't going well on the lake you are fishing, switch lakes or switch species! Sometimes your best plans don't go right and you need to adjust, adapt, and be flexible to save your fishing trip. My weekend at Winnibigoshish/Cutfoot Sioux was a prime example of that.