Ice fishing brook trout frenzy

With the weather warming up to a balmy -15 and the kids off school for New Year's break, I took Ari and Eli up North to ice fish for trout. Though the outfitter we normally go to typically stocks his lakes with rainbow trout, they put in 2000+ brook trout a couple week ago.

In contrast to rainbow trout that move around a lot under ice, brook trout tend to school up a lot more, so once start catching them out of a given hole, the chances are that you are in for non stop action. Although fishing is usually quite easy there, I brought along my manual auger, as well as my humminbird flasher, to try to make the outing a bit more exciting if the bite was slow.

Got to our on the lake shortly after 10:00 AM, started up a fire in the cabin. The guy drilling our holes had a problem with his auger, so I offered to use mine. Though we are allowed 5 lines per person, I started off drilling 3 holes, one for each of us to jig in. Set up the 3 rods with a 2 hook setup, and tipped them with live worms.

The action was immediate. Within 10 minutes, we already had 12-15 trout. Eli was thrilled to pull some out.

We caught a few doubles:

As the lake doesn't allow releasing fish, I decided to try to make it more exciting by switching to lures. Action remained just as fast, but the average size increased by an inch or 2.

Took less than 1 hour to catch our 20 trout quota, and didn't even get a chance to put out the flasher. Headed back home around 11:30 AM. will give us plenty time to fillet the day's catch.

For more information on fishing at or to contact Pourvoirie Coin Lavigne, click: http://freshwaterphil.com/pourvoiriecoinlavigne.cfm