ISU Ice Tournament at Hickory Grove Lake

Our Top 10 for the day

The Iowa State University Fishing Club held their annual ice tournament at Hickory Grove Lake today.  It was a nice turnout of 17 teams for the event. Weather for the day was overcast/drizzle throughout the day.  This actually helped the bite from the previous blue sky day on Saturday.  Once again, Mark Anderson and I joined up to fish the event.  The tournament limit was your top 10 panfish.  The lake has a good population of bluegills, some crappies and some green sunfish mixed in too.  We knew we had to focus on crappies to end up towards the top.

We both hit the lake on Saturday to look things over.  The previous weekend I was able to confirm some things we already knew about the lake from previous years.  We took our past experiences and what we saw on Saturday to come up with a game plan.  We had a solid plan A that we hoped would give us some crappies, and a plan B for big bluegills if we needed it.

The forecast on tournament day was cloudy with intermittent rain all day long, temps were in high 30's and was very comfortable to fish.  The overcast day definitely helped the fish bite all day long.  Water clarity in the lake was over 6 feet, the clouds definitely played in our favor on this day extending the bite.
We never did try plan B on the tournament day as plan A was very good to us.  We fished water from 14 feet to 25 feet deep.  Moving frequently helped us to stay on the moving schools of gills and crappies.  Light colored jigs seems to be the trick for us with a waxworm, although there was an hour or so mid-morning that the fish preferred red spikes.  Just more proof it is always good to have a variety of bait with you at all times.
One big advantage we had today was using the Vexilar FLX-28.  Almost all fish were caught suspended off the bottom several feet.  Utilizing the zoom feature to fine tune jigging cadence and capitalizing on then minuscule target separation really made working the fish a fun and an easy task on the day.
We ended up weighing in 9 crappies and one big bluegill that out-weighed other crappies that we had caught throughout the day.  Our 10 fish weighed in at 7.84#, good enough for 2nd place.  The winners, Chad Angell and Josh Sansgaard took 1st with 8.52#.  This event proved once again that this lake has some great fish in it!

Top 5 Results:

Angell/Sansgaard     8.52#

Reed/Anderson         7.84#

Stanley/Martin          4.50#

Kjormoe/Dolash       4.48#

Tom/Don                  4.40#