Tony Roach is used to jigging up super-tough walleyes with the finesse and precision of a puppet master. He fishes the rush-hour traffic on Mille Lacs, Minnesota, which last winter hosted “sell out”...View article
Rainbows, browns, cutthroats, brookies. Strong fighting, coldwater species, often active—if not fiercely aggressive—throughout winter. That’s not to say these fish can’t be finicky. Adverse...View article
Of all the factors that can affect winter walleye location and behavior—and thus dictate where you drill and how you fish—current ranks high among the least understood. Ditto for the flowing-water...View article
I fish for yellow perch on portions of the Great Lakes. About 80 days a year, I’m staring down an ice hole. A bass is a bass, they say, so surely a perch is a perch wherever they swim, this suggesting...View article
In Northwest Ontario, anglers count down the days in December, not to Christmas, but to the January 1 lake trout opener. I live in Kenona, on the north shore of Lake of the Woods, in the heart of some...View article
I spend 40 to 50 days on the ice each season—much of that time with an auger in hand. How do I always end up cutting most of the holes? Indeed, “Mr. Walleye” Gary Roach used to...View article
Peering down an ice hole for hours has a way of testing your character—a lot of waiting for something to happen punctuated by moments of great drama. From one minute to the next, the underwater turf...View article
That we had arrived on Tony Roach’s magic hump was obvious. Surrounded by a great expanse of nondescript white sat a sizeable piece of real estate, roughly the size of a hockey rink, where every 5...View article
So far as I can tell, the earliest published mention of the drop-shot appears in Bill Binkelman’s classic book, “Catching Walleyes.” In it, he writes at length about using these rigs, and his...View article
Finesse isn’t my strong suit, particularly when it comes to putting tough-bite panfish on the ice. I prefer carpet-bombing relatively beefy spoons over wide stretches of fish-holding areas to putzing...View article
