Ice Fishing
- Getting Started
- Ice Fishing Gear
- Ice Fishing Tactics & Techniques
- Fur Hat Ice Tour
- Ice Fishing Legends
Ice Fishing
Dead or Alive: How to Catch More Fish With Live and Dead Baits Through The Ice
Ice fishing has always made me feel nostalgic. As a guide, I spend most of my time rigging equipment and finding fish for clients. It can be hard to simply enjoy time on the water when you’re focused on giving your clients a successful fishing trip. But when I go ice fishing, all of that goes away...
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Ice Fishing
The 5 Hardest Fish to Catch Through the Ice
Almost every outdoor activity has its own upper tier. A black belt level test that outdoorsfolk take up to challenge themselves in hopes of finding out how far they can push their passion. For hikers, it can be a particularly rough or long trail. For hunters, it can be pursuing a difficult species...
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Ice Fishing
Unique Michigan Ice Fishing Season Closes After 48 Minutes
That was quick. A Michigan ice fishing season opened at 8 a.m. on Saturday, February 7, only to close 48 minutes later after the harvest quota was met. The quick season—if you want to call it that—took place on Black Lake, which is situated in Cheboygan and Presque Isle Counties, and was for lake...
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Ice Fishing
Ice Fishing 101
This time of year can be a tough stretch for hunters and anglers in northern states. Big game seasons are over, small game and waterfowl seasons are winding down, and we’re months away from gobbling turkeys and open water fishing. Spanning this stretch of the coldest, darkest months is ice fishing...
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Ice Fishing
5 Steps to Being Totally Prepared for Ice Fishing
We’ve all seen that guy at the boat launch floating away from the dock with a dead starter battery. The same scenario plays out in a different way when it comes to ice prep—maybe it’s a dead snowmobile or an auger that just won’t start or fishing line that’s seen too much UV. Most of us pile our ice...
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Ice Fishing
Video: How to Choose Ice Fishing Bait
The Fur Hat Ice Tour How-To Series is brought to you by ESKIMO. Bait selection for ice fishing can be as simple or complex as you want it to be—but you should want it to be complex. When it comes to fishing (like so many other pursuits), the more thought and effort you put in, the greater reward you...
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Gear
The Best Ice Fishing Rods
You can invest in the latest ice fishing tech, drop thousands on a top-of-the-line shanty, and suit up in the warmest duds, but no piece of gear is as essential to success on the hard water as a good ice fishing rod. Jump to: The Ice Fishing Rods We Use What We Look for in a Good Ice Fish Rod We've...
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Gear
The Best Ice Fishing Bibs
Kneeling on hard water and drilling through inches of ice in arctic-like conditions—ice fishing is just plain cold. Don’t dress right, and it can be miserable. But a quality pair of ice fishing bibs can keep you on the ice longer, up your odds, and even help save your life. Jump to: The Ice Fishing...
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Ice Fishing
How Technology Makes Us Better Ice Anglers
I’m generally old school and like to keep things simple. But the first time I used electronics for ice fishing, I knew I'd never fish without them. There are things you can fight, and then there are things you have to accept because they make a job so much easier you’d be crazy not to utilize them...
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Ice Fishing
10 Tools For Staying Alive while Ice Fishing
When I was a kid learning to ice fish with my friends, it simply wasn't cool to talk about safety. We all wanted to be tough and unafraid while doing an admittedly dangerous activity. In the years since then, however, I've seen and heard about far too many deaths and near-death experiences to be...
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Ice Fishing
Is Technology Helping Ice Anglers Catch More Fish?
My pearl white tube jig spiraled into the black abyss as I leaned over to turn on my flasher. The quiet hum of braided line free-spooling from my reel was quickly overtaken by the buzz emitted by the sonar. Or, maybe it was merely the audible buzz of my own excitement—the first drop of the morning...
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Ice Fishing
Video: How to Repair a Broken Ice Fishing Shelter Pole
The Fur Hat Ice Tour How-To Series is brought to you by ESKIMO. January and February are not known for providing balmy weather to the northern parts of the country. Ice fishing certainly leans into that fact, and a good-quality pop-up shelter is pretty much mandatory for any halfway serious ice...
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Ice Fishing
How to Ice Fish for Lake Trout
Catching a big lake trout is one of the greatest challenges in the angling world. For most of the year, these fish live in sparse, constantly roving schools in the deepest, darkest parts of lakes and reservoirs. They’re hard to find, hard to catch, and many anglers go hours and even entire days...
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Ice Fishing
How to Ice Fish Without Electronics
We either live in an exciting age of technology or a terrifying one. From heart transplants being performed by robots, to immersive virtual reality video games, to having Zoom meetings so we can go to work and not even put on pants. Sometimes it feels like our lives are becoming more and more like...
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Ice Fishing
How to Safely Ice Fish on Rivers
It wasn’t like in the movies with a spiderweb of cracks slowly forming beneath my feet, but rather a sharp loud “CRACK!” like a pistol shot. I knew I was in trouble right away. I was 17 years old, playing hooky from school to go ice fishing on the Connecticut River, which flowed near my small...
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Ice Fishing
How to Catch More Bluegill Ice Fishing
There’s something transcendent about your first fish. Whether you caught it as a child or later in life, holding that first wriggling, wet creature in your hands opens the door to the world of angling. While I’m sure there are a few truly blessed (or very lucky) anglers whose first fish was...
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Ice Fishing
5 Spots to Find Catfish Ice Fishing
Anglers across the United States spend a lot of time fishing for catfish, but that sure isn’t the case when it comes to ice fishing. More than likely this is because so many of the diehard cat chasers are located in the southern parts of the country that don’t usually freeze, unlike this year...
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22:01
Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E01Nov 6, 2020
Fish Local
Ice fishing can be intimidating and is often misunderstood. Even some hardcore anglers eschew ice fishing as either boring, miserable, or too gear intensive to be worth their while. This series intends to rectify some of these bogus misconceptions. In the first episode, Steven Rinella takes Tracy...
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Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E02Nov 13, 2020
Backcountry Burbot
To pivot off of the ease and accessibility we featured in Episode 1, Episode 2 goes the opposite direction and shows Cal and Miles embarking on a deep backcountry winter expedition requiring tracked Can-Ams and thousands of pounds of gear. Ice fishing can be simple and local, but it can also be...
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Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E03Nov 20, 2020
Stab Em' and Eat Em'
Kicking off the tour part of the Fur Hat Ice Tour, Janis Putelis travels to Whitefish Lake, Minnesota and meets up with local wild foods expert Mark Norquist who runs the Modern Carnivore website. In this episode, Mark introduces Janis to dark house ice spearing, a hallowed tradition for winter food...
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Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E04Nov 27, 2020
Favorite Fish
Janis continues the Minnesota segment of the tour on Lake Mille Lacs. He’s guided by renowned angler and wildlife biologist Mandy Uhrich. Mandy knows as much about this walleye fishery and the reasons why it has changed over the past generation, as anyone. Mille Lacs is not the ridiculous walleye...
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Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E05Dec 4, 2020
Spearing Dinosaurs Part 1
Janis hops the state line over to Wisconsin and travels to Lake Winnebago for the annual lake sturgeon spearing season. Lake sturgeon are ancient and incredible fish, and the communities around lake Winnebago have long revered and relied on these fish. For generations, people around here have spent...
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Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E06Dec 11, 2020
Spearing Dinosaurs Part 2
While part 1 is all about the preparation for sturgeon season, part 2 follows Janis, Jake, and his whole crew as they attempt to achieve the improbable, spear a lake sturgeon by hand through a hole in the ice. Success requires patience, intense focus, quick reflexes, and a steady hand. Will Janis...
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Fur Hat Ice TourS01 E07Dec 18, 2020
Ice Fishing in Downtown Green Bay & Homemade Airboat Ride
Pat Durkin shows Janis around Green Bay, Wisconsin and explain to him how the Fox River and the Green Bay of Lake Michigan are success stories for the conservation ethic of the late 20th century. They do a little ice fishing right in downtown Green Bay and take a ride on a questionable homemade...
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Ice Fishing
Fact Checker: Do You Lose Half of Your Body Heat from Your Head?
Myths, lies and old wives’ tales loom large in the outdoor pursuits. Here at MeatEater, we’re dedicated to separating facts from bullsh*t, so we created this series to examine suspect yarns. If there’s a belief, rumor, or long-held assumption you’d like us to fact check, drop us a note at...
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Ice Fishing
Photos: Angler Breaks Idaho Perch Record
On Tuesday, March 9, Adam Mann of Mosinee, Wisconsin, landed a 3.22-pound, 16.25-inch-long perch out of Lake Cascade in Idaho. “I pulled what looked like a football out of the ice and stared at it for about five seconds before I just started yelling,” Mann told MeatEater. “I laid it next to the...
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Ice Fishing
6 Ways to Die While Ice Fishing
Casey and I were standing outside the wall tent enjoying the Montana winter starlight in all its glory when red flashing lights from the top of the grade cut through our rapture. Two and a half hours from the nearest hospital, we figured the ambulance must be arriving for a critical reason. Over the...
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Ice Fishing
Ice Anglers Catch Big Muskie on Transducer
This article comes from the Bent Fishing Podcast’s “Fish News” segment, where hosts Joe Cermele and Miles Nolte go head to head to find and report the most interesting and amusing fishy stories across sources far and wide—from respected scientific journals to trashy tabloids. On Jan. 16, Jon Kuznia...
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Ice Fishing
The $18 Million Ice Fishing Drug Bust
It’s estimated that over 100 million people will watch the Super Bowl this weekend, making it the most viewed live event of the year. With so many Americans glued to their flat screens, it seems like the perfect time to get away with something nefarious—at least that’s the logic Colombian drug...
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Ice Fishing
Hundreds of Ice Fishermen Stranded in Blizzard: ‘It Looks Like Antarctica’
With walleye season winding down across Minnesota, fishermen from all over the state descended on the most famous lakes for a final weekend of action. Friday and Saturday offered beautiful weather: temps in the 30s with barely a breeze. Sunday, however, ushered in a storm that brought straight-line...
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