Midwinter Crappies: Duff Wins NAIFC Event
Case study in midwinter crappie and sunfish methods!By Mark Strand
On a day when only the hardiest winter anglers would fish outside, Ice Team pro Duff Peddycoart and his partner Mitch Thies won the NAIFC season opener on Minnesota’s Lake Osakis.
The first NAIFC qualifier for 2009 was held Sunday, Jan. 4 on this renowned panfish lake near Alexandria. After relatively milder weather during practice, high pressure, high skies and a cold snap arrived for tournament day. Actual air temperatures were about 15 below zero, with wind chills well below that, forcing many competitors to fish inside Fish Traps much of the day.
How Duff went about the process of locating fish and catching them (as always) is the real story, the one that everybody who wants to refine their own personal fishing style is interested in. The lessons learned in high level competition almost always translate into great nuggets of information.
That is definitely the case here.
Duff is known as a crappie guy. He seems to have magical powers when it comes to locating and triggering nice crappies, and after the tournament we received an inquiry from an Ice Team forum member (Cody Tabbert) who also fished the event.
Cody wanted to ask Duff where he searched for crappies on Lake Osakis, and why he picked those areas. And what changes he made based on the weather change, if any.
So here, in answer to Cody’s questions, is a detailed explanation of how Duff approached this midwinter crappie situation. The results were impressive, as Duff and Mitch set a tournament record of 10.21 pounds for 8 crappies and 8 sunfish, including Duff’s 1.62-pound crappie, which won big fish honors.
Midwinter Crappie Location
First things first. We always say you can’t catch fish if you can’t find ‘em.
Duff understands the fundamentals of winter crappie location well.
Here is how he went about the search on Osakis, which is a classic natural lake featuring a wide variety of depths and plenty of prominent structural elements.
His first goal, as is often the case with Duff, was to get away from the commotion at community spots. By midwinter, clusters of permanent shacks and portable shelters can be found at known fish-producing areas. We often say, and it’s true, that you can join the group and catch fish, and this remains a good idea if your main goal is to catch some and you don’t worry about winning a tournament.
But Duff was in the competition to win it, so he was determined to find unpressured fish.
“I fish away from the crowd,” he said afterward. “I get away from the houses and the other people.”
As Dave Genz always says, any pod of fish will feature only so many biters, so when numerous anglers are ‘sharing’ fish, which is a common saying out there, it can get tough to coax bites after the crowd works the fish over. That, and the commotion created by comings and goings and hole drillings, has a way of causing fish to slide to the side, and become increasingly finicky.
But you hear this advice all the time. Get away from the crowd. What good does it do to hear that advice if you don’t know where to go once you leave the crowd behind, right?
Here is Duff’s approach to finding midwinter crappies:
- In most lakes, crappies have vacated the shallow weeds, even the deep weed edges, by this period. At early ice, you might find crappies and sunfish in good weeds, but these areas do not usually produce all winter long, if the ice remains for more than about a month.
- So Duff looks carefully at the contour map, and notes where deep water areas are in relation to where good weed growth occurs.
“I look around in the middle of the lake,” he says. “When I look at the map, I might find a big area that’s 20 or 30 feet deep, or maybe 40 feet.”
Another interruption here: notice that he did not say 60, 70, 80 feet. Lake Osakis has nosebleed basins like that, but Duff would not focus on such extreme depths when looking for crappies. It is the mid-level depths that should catch your attention when scanning contour maps.
“The best place to start (looking) is in the middle of that (mid-level basin area),” says Duff. (Remember that he said midwinter crappies like to be away from everything. But here is where Duff refines his advice, revealing that, while he starts searching in the middle of likely deep-water areas, he has one eye on the direction of those productive shallow weeds or other cover.)
“Start in the middle (in this case, his search area was a big bay),” says Duff, “but work toward where any nearby weeds would come up. In the spring, and early summer, crappies would be in those weeds.”
Duff also looks for structural elements not connected to the shoreline, such as humps (large humps are sometimes called ‘sunken islands’ which is a funny term, because they were probably never islands that sunk). Anyway, these structural elements can attract life, including midwinter crappies, but the crappies are likely to be away from those structures, too, rather than right up on them.
“If you can find a hump,” says Duff, “go on the outskirts of it, toward the deeper water, and start looking there.”
Plenty of Hole Drilling
The ‘looking’ is where modern mobile ice anglers get their reputation. The reason there are unpressured pods of midwinter crappies, and sunfish, is that it usually takes time and effort to find them. Duff was using the latest LakeMaster chip in his GPS to put himself accurately over likely areas, but no GPS chip is going to tell you where the crappies are right now! It’s up to you to drill holes and look down every hole to see if fish are present.
Duff is a drilling man, one of those guys who fires up his StrikeMaster auger and cuts and cuts. He makes it look effortless, and the tools are so much better than they used to be, but it does take more effort than setting up camp over one set of holes.
His work typically results in fish discoveries, especially when teaming up with friends. In this case, he and partner Mitch were both drilling plenty of holes in practice, taking turns coming behind the other with the Vexilar, putting the transducer into every hole.
You’re looking for a ‘Christmas Tree,’ a slang term for one of those holes where flickers of fish signals come and go at numerous depths– or where the screen lights up bright and stays that way. When you see that, you can’t get the bait down there fast enough as your heart races wondering what they are and how active they might be.
In this case, as Duff and Mitch searched across a big bay in about 18 - 22 feet, most of the crappies were tight to bottom. That complicated the matter of seeing them on the Vexilar, although, as Duff points out, “if you’re used to watching the Vexilar, you’re looking for that fluttering bottom signal.”
What he means: the bottom signal on a Vexilar is often a well-defined, unmoving line. But if fish are close to bottom or right on it, you will often see a fuzzy bottom signal that seems to dither, or vibrate, almost as if it’s rising up and settling back down.
Because that was the case on Osakis during practice for this tournament, Duff and Mitch fished many holes, quickly dropping a Frostee Jigging Spoon or Fat Boy, baited with maggots, to see if fish would rise up to it.
“You don’t spend much time in any hole,” stressed Duff. “You have a lot of ground to cover, so you can’t sit there if no fish show up.”
Particularly true during the daylight hours, another notion that Genz talks about constantly. Whereas fish can be on the move and actively looking for something to eat during the prime times of sunrise and sunset, most crappies and sunfish sit for extended periods during the day.
“The whole key,” says Duff, “is to drill many holes. You could be 30 feet away from a big group of crappies, but if you don’t move 30 feet toward them and drill another hole, you won’t find them. The more holes you drill, the more fish you’re gonna find.”
So that’s how it went during practice, like it does every day for Duff. Drill, drill, drill, look, look, look, drop a jig down whenever you’re not sure. Eventually, fish are found. Then, you see whether they’re the ones you’re looking for.
“On Friday and Saturday (the two days before Sunday’s tournament), we caught gorgeous fish,” said Duff. “The sunfish were super nice, and so were the crappies. I had all our places marked out. We knew where we were going to fish in the tournament.”
Specific areas were saved onto the GPS as waypoints, so the team could easily find them and drill holes right over their most productive practice spots.
Tournament Day Strategy
As usual on the day of a tournament, Sunday brought changes the team had to adapt to.
For one thing, slush. Plenty of snow on top of the ice (a common ingredient in many Ice Belt states this winter) creates a slush problem.
Drilling holes brought water gushing to the surface, because of the pressure being applied by the snow, and complicated the slushy conditions. That made it a bad idea to park the team’s snowmobile close to those holes, because the cold weather would freeze everything badly.
“Fishing in the slush was not a good idea,” was how Genz put it.
So, adapting to the realities, Duff elected to “go between the spots I had marked on the GPS, and we drilled on drier ground and found some fish by doing that. We punched as many holes as we could.”
The extreme cold complicated the fishing process also, evidenced by Duff spilling his maggots onto the ice at the first hole and having them freeze solid instantly. He couldn’t even reach down and pick them up in time to save them!
Luckily, ever the Boy Scout, Duff had a second Bait Puck loaded with maggots on an inside pocket of his Ice Armor suit, and that saved the day.
The weather did not result in a big location shift by the fish. They were still there, but it took a more refined presentation to get them to bite.
Presentation Details
Here’s another series of fine points that separate great anglers from the rest of us: Duff and Mitch had methodically tested many presentations during practice.
After finding workable pods of fish, Duff would work his way through numerous rods, which he had pre-rigged with different color jigs.
He tried many colors, and varying numbers of maggots, and various plastic tails.
“You have to see what they want, and how they want it,” he says, advice that you often hear. But Duff means business in this regard every time out, and by tournament day he had noted that these fish seemed to like chartreuse or gold jigs best. He and Mitch settled on Frostee Jigging Spoons and Fat Boys, and the same colors held on tournament day. But they had to slow down the presentation a bit to get the fish to commit.
Follow the Moving Pod
If you’ve made it this far, a real nugget as a reward.
When Duff hooks each fish, as he fights it toward the surface, he pays close attention to the dominant direction the fish tries to go. He believes that gives away the location of “his buddies” and helps you track the main group of fish.
“When you reel a fish up,” says Duff, “watch to see if it’s pulling to the right, or left, or trying to go straight ahead. That tells you to go that way (with your next series of holes). I want to know where that fish is trying to get back to.”
Genz often says it’s a collection of little things that lead to consistent success in fishing. As you can see, Duff works hard at ice fishing, because he loves the sport and wants to catch fish every time out. Even when the conditions are cold and difficult, he relies on Ice Armor boots and suits and gloves and hats to let him remain super mobile.
After Duff settles over a good pod of fish, he loves to go into the Fish Trap and turn the heater on for a while. But he’s rarely in one place for long, because to keep catching fish, he believes in moving whenever the action slows down.
“Drill as many holes as it takes to find some fish,” he says, “and then figure out what it takes to catch those fish.”
It’s not rocket science, but it is modern ice fishing, as practiced by one of the best in the business.
Notes: Duff Peddycoart was not the only Team True Blue pro who did well in this event. Don Cox, who lives out in the Nebraska Sandhills, proved again that the Genz system works wherever you go. Cox and longtime partner Dave Fehlhafer finished second… we’ll hear more on midwinter fishing from Don Cox soon…
Also, the amazing team of Joe Pikulski and Myron Gilbert, who won the Clam NAIFC Team of the Year title in ‘07-’08, continued its consistent string of success by finishing third. Myron and Joe, a featured team on the new reality TV series, Ice Men, which airs on the Sportsman’s Channel, wear the Clam colors on the circuit…
Also, Ice Team pro Jim Kusuda, who gives freely of his practice time to teach kids’ clinics, had another impressive finish as well… he and longtime partner Terry Rogers finished in 8th place at Osakis…
And how about the young team of Tristen and Zack Cox… two of Don’s sons also made the pilgrimage from Mullen, Nebraska, finishing 18th, ahead of many very good teams!
Product reviews: Duff came off the brutal and slushy ice singing the praises of the new Ice Armor Boots. “I was walking through slush the whole time,” he said, “but my feet were completely dry all day. They were awesome.”
Duff was also impressed with prototype rods he was testing, something you’ll hear more about in the coming months. In the deep water, during a tentative bite, he says, is where you separate great rods from the ones that just can’t signal subtle bites. “I loved the action,” said Duff, “and they had excellent feel.”
To finish, he reiterated something we have all come to know: even in extreme conditions, Vexilar flashers perform flawlessly. “I half expected to hear the thing creaking out there,” said Duff, “but I turned it on and it whirred away like it always does. Nothing stops those things.”
More tournament info… for complete details on this and upcoming NAIFC events, go to naifc.com.
