Outrageous Tactics for Top Predators like Perch, Walleyes, Pike, and Crappies

Docks. Lily pads. Slop. It’s all good. Whisper the word “Toad” or “Popper” to a bass fisherman and watch his eyes fixate on an imaginary blow-up in the pencil reeds. He might even reel-down in preparation for a phantom hookset. Not a blink. Not a breath. The moment of truth is but a second away.

Sorry, bass-heads—you’ve lost topwater exclusivity. There’ll be no submarine-like bursts through the ice; but in the winter under certain circumstances, predator fish press to the surface to feed.

Brian “Bro” Brosdahl calls them “risers,” predators that elevate to hit overhead forage. They’re drawn to locomotion just below the ice, careless critters. And he says it’s either their silhouette or light reflecting off their scales that garners unwanted attention from predators.

He cites an example where sunlight danced off his spoon, causing predatory perch to lose their cool. “It was on Leech Lake in early winter.

I was fishing a fairly shallow weedflat, 14 feet of water, on a super bright day. I could see the bottom clearly, a mixture of coontail and cabbage, with a little chara grass on the outside. This was in the pre-underwater-camera era, so I was truly sightfishing.

“On my first drop,” Bro says, “I noticed that the spoon threw an array of light that looked like a million minnows. Sort of a disco-ball thing, with all that light bouncing off the underside of the ice. And about that time, a jumbo perch—I mean a serious jumbo—rocketed off the bottom and hit the spoon right under the ice.”

That jumbo was followed by others—call them alpha perch; but after icing a half-dozen or so, the melee subsided. Bro saw fish enter the militarized zone but not shooting for the surface, so he dipped down, and a handful of fish rose to meet the bait—not hot enough to blast the surface, but the glittering spoon had brought them into the zone.

Soon Bro restarted, disco-balling at the surface once more. It worked. The aerial display summoned a fresh batch of perch, and the hittin’ and stickin’ was on. “I’ll be honest,” he says. “Unless I’m seeing fish on the Vexilar, 90 percent of my time is spent jigging high, way off bottom, above where most anglers expect the fish to be.”

How High

Bear in mind that what constitutes ”surface” or ”high” is relative to the body of water. On a jaunt last winter to a lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Bro sat over 60 feet of amazingly clear water. The walleyes, according to flasher readings, were passing 20 feet down and responding to his Lindy Rattl’r Spoon 10 feet down.

And on the same winter pilgrimage, this time on Lake Michigan’s Bays de Noc, he established a topwater pattern in 35 feet of water. According to the Vexilar, walleyes were screeching in and out of range at two to four feet from the bottom. He jigged hard from 10 to 15 feet down, lowering the spoon when red marks sailed upwards. Collisions, he said, occurred at about 20 feet.

Bro can and did catch fish nearer the bottom, where the walleyes originated; but he found that the fish willing to elevate were more aggressive biters.

Bro says the phenomenon of “splitting the distance” is common. “In a clear lake in 20 feet of water, it’s typical to meet the fish at 10 feet. Sometimes, if you make them swim too high, they walk,” he says. “So I drop down a tad when I see marks rising.”