Smallies on the rocks, ain't no big surprise!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:14:00 GMT

One of the best thrills you can experience fishing through the ice is the congregating and staging of Smallies on rock piles in March and April as the ice exits the scene. Recently my son and I ventured out to one of my favorite rock pile on Roy Lake, SD. Jan at Roy Lake Resort set us up with a burger basket to go and out we went.

We went to the spot on the spot and set up our portable and I no sooner dropped the camera down the hole and there was the first Smallie. Charlie (my son) was all but climbing the walls watching the monitor and hurrying me to get the teaser leaders rigged up and down the hole. We dressed a plasmic pink mono series teaser leader with a 3" sucker minnow. A few minutes down on the rocks and a 16 inch walleye came through and helped itself to a delicious sucker minnow. Over the next few hours we picked up a few more Walleyes, Northern Pike and Smallmouth with the biggest Smallmouth coming up at 18". A great day on the ice and we headed in. The teaser leader was performing perfectly. It glowed, shimmered and clicked with every move of the sucker minnow creating the appearance time after time of a vertical stack of bait fish that the finned ones below couldn't resist.

The next morning we hit the ice a little earlier before dusk and set up about 6 feet from the prior day. Same process of dropping the camera down and same immediate view of cruising Smallies. The only difference was one particular fish we saw. It is always a little hard to tell how big a fish is on an underwater camera but since we both found ourselves shaking and could hear our hearts pounding outside our coveralls we agreed it was a little larger than what we had seen the day before. I prepared the teaser leader again and had the camera zoomed in on where the teaser leader would descend to. Charlie dropped the teaser leader down the hole, let out line and all the normal stuff. Problem was the rig was not showing up at the bottom. As you can imagine the Smallie grabbed the sucker on it's way down. Charlie felt a tap vibration through the line, reeled up the slack and gave it all he had. The fish put up a great fight and he landed his lifetime biggest Smallie to date measuring in slightly longer than 20 inches.

We went on to catch a few more fish but he couldn't get on-line fast enough to fill out the S.D. Trophy Fish catch and release form.

Here is the fish. Needless to say, we will be heading out again before the last of the ice is gone for a repeat and possibly a new personal 8 year old record.

Chuck Eldredge

Smallies on the rocks, ain't no big surprise!