WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
January 3, 2008

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Happy New Year! Before moving into this weeks report, I just wanted to thank everyone for a great year and I will be catching up with you on making sure we have the open-water trips set for the upcoming season. We are only five months out, certainly the longest months of the year!

It's hard to believe that 2007 has come and gone and now we are in 2008. With 2008 here, the ice fishing, cold weather, high winds, then the Flu, yep I guess one could say that Winter has certainly shown itself and one could say we are seeing a winter of the good old days this year. We have seen much needed precipitation fall in the form of snow and then add in those cold, below-to-near-zero temperatures, and it has to be one of those good old Northern Minnesota Winters.

With all the snow, most area lakes have poor ice fishing conditions. The snow base is making for some thick insulation and even thicker slush. Most area lakes are holding 8-14 inches of ice with 8-12 inches of snow and then another 2-4 inches of slush. The slush is making for the poor ice conditions as it has slowed travel down on most smaller lakes and even this last week we have seen the slush set in on Winnie.

As for the fishing, Winnie is producing a consistent evening bite. Most of the best action is starting around 3:00 p.m. and lasting to dark or shortly after dark. The large schools of baitfish have moved onto many of the mid-lake humps, making most humps filled with bait, a difficult place to catch numbers. We have used a jump to hump approach, where we are mainly trying to find structures with little to no bait fish on the Vexilar. The structures with little to no bait have produced more consistently then those filled with large schools of bait.

The Winnie Perch have really started to show themselves in that deep water this last week. I did see some positive signs of those jumbo Perch which have seemed to be non-existent the last few years. Here we have found the deep holes located to the shoreline structure to hold large numbers of Perch in a variety of sizes. The Perch activity at this point seems to be one of hit or miss, with the feeding activity showing peaks and valleys throughout the day.

If you are planning on heading out fishing, please use caution as another warm spell will be upon us this weekend and those ice conditions are tricky and the ice depths are varying from lake to lake and from spot to spot.

See you on the water,

Sean Colter
member of NMGL
seancolter@seancolter.com