Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

With apologies for stating the obvious, in order to catch fish you have to put your baits and lures in front of the fish. Ice-fishermen tend to concentrate on shallow water even though deep water is often home to the biggest fish, just as it is during the open-water season.

Deep-water ice-fishing seems daunting because so much water is involved. Ice-fishermen always have the limitation of not being able to cover much water. It takes time to drill a hole, and then all you can do is fish directly under that hole. If you want to move to a new spot, you have to drill another hole and go through the process of preparation and presentation again, and unlike moving in open water, you cannot cover the water between those holes.

Most of the things that ice-fishermen must do are either complicated or otherwise made more difficult because of water depth increases.

TAKE THE ADVANTAGE
Probably the most important tool an ice-fisherman can carry for deep-water fishing is a sonar fish-finder unit. Relatively few ice-fishermen carry sonar and this is probably one of the main reasons that more of them do not fish deeper water. But the plain fact of the matter is that if you are really serious about ice-fishing, then you should strongly consider buying a sonar that is specifically designed for ice-fishing, even if it takes tossing your change in a cookie jar every day to save enough money to buy one.

Sonar will let you know precisely how deep the water is and what is in that water between the ice and the bottom. That latter point is one that many ice-fishermen ignore. In fact, fishermen, in general, tend to concentrate too much on the lake bottom. Deep-water ice-fishing does not necessarily mean that your lure or bait should sit on the bottom of the lake.

BOTTOMING OUT
Let’s start with placing a lure or a bait close to bottom. Fish tend to be less active under the ice than they are during the open-water period. They are simply less apt to move far to take a bait or lure. Fish that are hugging bottom are probably there for a reason. Therefore, precise bait placement is very important. The difference between the right and wrong place can mean a matter of inches.

A good sonar unit can be a tremendous help in presentation if it is sensitive enough to provide an image of the lure or bait. All you have to do is watch the sonar screen to know precisely where your lure or bait is. (Without a sonar image, you will have to measure the line. Use a clip-on depthfinder [a lead weight that clips onto the end of the line]. Lower the depthfinder to the bottom, pinch on a small split shot to mark the line, and then retrieve the depthfinder and lower your bait or lure.)

When using a tip-up, allow for the length of the tip-up. Pinch the line at the top of the ice, lay the line along the tip-up from the point where it rests on the ice down to the spool, add about a foot, and then pinch on the split shot at that point. If you keep the split shot at the end of the tip-up spool, the bait or lure will be about a foot off bottom.