Precise Location: A Must For Icing Great Lakes Trophy ’Eyes - By Mark Martin

Ice fishing the Great Lakes is an experience like no other. The arctic-like tundra shifts 

and shimmies with the wind and water currents, and mounds of ice may pile up before your very eyes on one side of a sheet of ice, while cracks grow to gaps on the other. 

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No, we’re not talking about the saint from Assisi, but the river that flows through the rocky and rugged mountains of Missouri’s southeastern Ozarks, and the secret is the great smallmouth population hiding where few men venture to cast.

It’s a secret because for most of the St. Francis’ flow, it roars and rumbles and tumbles in ways that would tip over and bust up canoes, even with an experienced paddler in command. It’s not your typical Ozark float stream.

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“Nightcrawler Secrets”  Revisited

By Ted Pilgrim with Tom Neustrom

“Never before have I asked you, or anyone, to keep an angling secret. I’m going to break this rule now and ask you point-blank NOT to pass on this information. It is much too deadly, it took many years to accumulate, and it’s worth too much to just give out willy-nilly… 

  This method is so deadly that I debated for several years about publishing it at all. But I finally decided to do it because there are just too darn many big fish that don’t get caught. They grow old, grow big, and die of old age—wasted!”

—Bill Binkelman, from Nightcrawler Secrets, circa 1965

Drifting back to a time when fishing sages still clenched corncob pipes, a man named Bill Binkelman was starting something big. Inspired by the writings of the great Buck Perry, Binkelman, a Milwaukee, Wis., sporting goods store manager, began work on a new breed of fishing how-to, which eventually became Fishing Facts magazine.

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Perch And ‘Eyes on Ice

By Ted Takasaki and Scott Richardson

Let other anglers spend the winter sitting at home suffering from a bad case of cabin fever. Dave Genz found the cure long ago. 

While others watch movies, the father of modern ice fishing watches his GPS and electronic sonar maps as he heads over hard water deciding where to cut holes.

By the time mid-winter has arrived, Genz has moved off smaller lakes, where perch and walleye were main targets earlier in the season. Oxygen depletion eventually takes a toll on the mood of the fish. They become lazy and harder to convince to bite. At the same time, walleye have moved away from shore to offshore structures. Point of fact: bigger lakes simply offer more of those fish-producing targets than smaller lakes do.

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