I can’t help but think of the buzz that surrounded Allen Iverson a few years ago on most of the sports channels for nearly a week. It was in regards to his lack of willingness to practice. For fisherman practice really does make perfect, even though we don’t think of it as that. Instead we call it experience, water time, or sometimes a hard lesson. As a full time fisherman I shouldn’t have to practice, right? Nothing could be farther from the truth. Anglers often use the word experiment, but really it is practicing.
Due to a lack of good ice at my home in northern Ohio I recently traveled to Lake Simcoe, which is situated roughly eighty miles North of Toronto. This lake, while known for many things, is perch Mecca. We had the good misfortune to be catching 8-inch perch seemingly at will. Sounds like a problem? Well it is when you’re on arguably the best perch lake on the planet and you aren’t catching jumbos.
After going through all of the regular “go to” lures without catching what we were after, my ice fishing buddy yells over, “We need to get some plastics on.” I honestly have very little confidence in plastics but I’d like to think that I’m not too stubborn to try. This is especially the case when my buddy a minute later flopped a 14-inch jumbo on the ice.
Fancy new gadgets such as flashers and underwater camera’s make us much better fisherman, but to get better, sometimes we need to go to the basics. Don’t get me wrong I’m not giving up my Humminbird flasher but sometimes we can learn the most with our eyeballs and nothing else.
In the few moments after dropping down a jig with a large straight plastic tail, I knew why it was going to work. The answer was in the hole as I looked at this new combo in the water. Motion without moving the lure in the water column can be deadly on the big ones. When held perfectly motionless the little tail still wiggled around like a fart in a jug. On that day the wiggly tail was the trigger to get the jumbos to bite.
I’m sure next time it will be something different they want but I now have more confidence in plastics and another tool in my arsenal. Maybe Iverson doesn’t need to practice, but this fisherman sure does.
Capt. Ross Robertson is an Ice Team pro. The Ice Team was at the beginning of the Ice Fishing Revolution . . . because they started it. Find out more about the Ice Team at IceTeam.com
For more info from Capt. Ross make sure you check out his website http://www.bigwaterfishing.com/ and blog http://bigwaterfishing.blogspot.com/