Dave Genz on Midwinter ’09

Exclusive Ice Team Feature:
An interview with Dave Genz on the return of old-fashioned winter and what it means to your midwinter fishing fortunes.

Nobody fishes through the ice more, and nobody travels more widely to do it, than Dave Genz. He’s been a believer in the value of travels, in order to gain perspective, for many years. As we write this, in mid January of 2009, he and Ice Team pro Rick Johnson are in the middle of a three-week trip that will take them through the eastern states, eventually to the eastern edge of the Ice Belt, in Maine.
Dave has been making this sort of run, several times each winter, for years. Every time out, he gains new insights into what works everywhere. What he learns becomes part of what we share with you, so that you can become better at finding and catching fish on your own.
No matter where you fish.
Here, in Q&A format, is a snapshot from Dave Genz on the winter of ’08-’09.

Q: Even with the widespread mild winters many regions have experienced recently, you’ve been warning us that a good old-fashioned winter had to hit sooner or later. Here it is! Give us a glimpse into some of your general observations of how things have been so far this winter.
A: I’ve been out on the ice since the Friday before Thanksgiving this year, which was good. We had cold weather early and it was making really good ice. In northern Minnesota, where we started, we got 6 to 8 inches of good ice before there was any snow.
As you would guess, the fishing was really good right away. You had to be careful (about not spooking fish), but we made some good catches in those first days on the ice.
But since then, we’ve had lots of snow. It’s been causing a lot of flooding (slush problems).
Winter is back, and what I have been experiencing lately (by mid January) is that the shallow water fish are hard to catch, or not there anymore. Those fish are moving out of shallow bays and into deeper water. The heavy snow cover is causing weeds in the shallow water to die off, and reducing oxygen in there, so many of those fish go deeper.
There are still some fish in shallow water, but they’re hard to catch. Maybe a better way to put it is that the active fish are deeper. Some fish migrate out of shallow water (when oxygen gets low) and some don’t.

Q: You’ve taught us about this dynamic for many years, but in the recent past, there have been winters when good shallow fishing has been available all winter long. With less snow, more sunlight can penetrate, you get some photosynthesis, and weeds can stay alive and even new weeds can grow, right? But when the shallow weeds are ‘brown and down’ as you call it, what do you tell ice anglers to do?
A: If you’ve been catching fish in the weeds in a shallow bay, and they’re either gone or you can’t catch ‘em anymore, look at the (underwater contour) map and go to the nearest deeper water outside the weeds. If the weedline (depth beyond which weeds grow in a given body of water) is at 12 feet, and you can find 15 to 20 feet of water close by, that’s where you want go look. If you can still catch fish in the shallow water, stay in there. But if they quit biting in there or disappear, you can’t just sit there and say they aren’t biting.

Q: But, as we’ve heard you say before, it’s not like those fish travel long distances in a lot of cases, right?
A: Right. They often set up in shallow water that’s close to deeper water they can retreat to, if necessary.

Q: And you don’t want to get sidetracked for long, assuming you can still see fish in the shallows but can’t make them bite, right?
A: Right. The more active and aggressive fish are probably in deeper water when that happens.

Q: We’ve heard you say this before, too, but it’s not DEEP water you’re looking for, in a lot of cases… except for some species (lake trout come to mind), you aren’t really looking to drill holes in 60-, 70-, 80-foot basins, correct?
A: Correct. My first choice, in fact, is a depression in the same bay you were catching the fish in. If it’s a large bay, look for a depression. It might only be a few feet deeper, but those fish might be in there now (at midwinter).
If there isn’t a depression within the shallow water area, I look for humps, sunken islands, underwater points that extend a long ways out into the lake. Those are the kind of spots that hold fish at midwinter.
If it was weeds (or other shallow cover) you were fishing, look outside those weeds. A lot of times, it seems to be somewhere between 20 and 30 feet (where he succeeds in finding ‘lost’ fish at midwinter). It’s not like fish won’t be in that really deep water, but if you cross over that 30-foot mark (and fish deeper than that), it’s hard to release smaller fish.
(He is referring to difficulties many fish species have when being released, even right away, after being brought up from more than 30 feet of water.)

Q: You mention structural elements that are in nearby deeper (but not DEEP) water. For an awful lot of people, finding such spots is easier said than done. Talk more about how you can get over such places accurately.
A: A lot of lake maps were made many years ago, using crude methods, and they don’t have the detail you need. You might see the general shape of a piece of structure, but have to drill a lot of holes to find specific things. We all did it the hard way for years– drill a line of holes out away from the shallow bay, and check each one to find where the depth started to break down. Once you find the break, then you’d drill more holes, lines in different directions, and eventually you either wear yourself out or find some fish.
Modern lake maps are a lot more detailed, and you can get paper maps or chips for your GPS. The newer map chips, by Lakemaster or Navionics, are amazingly accurate, and can place you right over the top of these spots. It certainly saves a lot of hole drilling.
But there are plenty of good fishing lakes that don’t have detailed maps. Thankfully, our Strikemaster augers let us drill as many holes as it takes to look for fish. I still fish in a lot of places where there’s no map, so you just have to drill it out. If you think of it ahead of time, you can run these lakes in your boat and map out the structures yourself, by saving waypoints and tracks in your GPS unit.
If you have one of those map chips, your job of checking out these spots is so much easier. A lot of times, if there’s a depression in a large bay, it will be easy to see it on the map chip, and you can drill holes in that depression without having to drill a hole line of holes looking for it.

Q: Okay, so no matter how we do it, if we have to follow fish out of shallow spots and look for them in deeper water, that also sets up a wider range of possibilities when it comes to what depth those fish might be in, right? In other words, there’s a wider range of possible depths the fish might be holding in, based on light levels and other factors, as you have always pointed out. Talk about how crucial the Vexilar is for this time of year.
A: In commercials, I have said I won’t go fishing without my Vexilar, and nobody ever had to convince me to say that. I won’t go fishing without it, because it’s that important. Nothing gives you that top to bottom view of the whole water column, and you can go confidently into that deeper water and know you’ll see the fish, no matter what depth they’re at.
Many times, in these deeper water spots, the fish are suspended. You have to see what depth they’re at, or you can’t present the bait to them so they’ll see it. If you just fish down by the bottom all the time, you’re going to miss an amazing amount of fish.

Q: For anybody who doesn’t use a Vexilar regularly, we encourage you not to feel overwhelmed by thinking that it will be ‘hard to learn’ or difficult to figure out what the blips on the screen mean. A little plug here for the instructional DVD that comes packed with every new unit. And, if you go to vexilar.com you can order a copy for a very low price.
That’s not really a question, but tell us some more about using the Vexilar and the dimension it adds to your fishing.
A: It’s one of my favorite parts of fishing, is putting that Vexilar transducer into every hole to see what’s down there. It’s instant, and it makes the search for fish so much fun. When you’re going from hole to hole, you’re looking for that Christmas tree, we call it. You put the transducer in the hole and the screen lights up full of fish, and it gets you really excited.
After you’ve been using one for a while, you don’t see lines on the screen anymore; your mind sees the fish, and you can’t get your bait down there fast enough. And you get even more excited when you lower the lure down and a fish comes rushing up to it.

Q: When you’re in search mode like this, we’ve seen you do the trick of rocking the transducer back and forth in the hole. It happens fast, but we can see it on video of you working with somebody who’s drilling, and you’re coming behind them checking the holes. Tell us about that.
A: It works really well. You wave the transducer in the hole, rock it back and forth like it’s on a pendulum, so it looks out to all sides. Sometimes you see fish signals only when the transducer is pointing out a certain direction, away from the hole. It lets you look out farther to the side than if you just set it in the hole and let it level up.

Q: But you don’t usually drill another hole in that direction right away. It seems like you start fishing in that hole.
A: Yes, that is how I do it. If I see a fish outside the normal cone (a term for the ‘area of coverage’ of the sonar signal), I’m gonna fish that hole, drop my line down, and see if I can pull that fish into the hole.
If I don’t get that fish to come into the hole, then I’ll drill more holes in the direction where I saw that fish signal show up. But first, I’m going to try to pull that fish into my hole and make it bite.

Q: Let’s talk about situations where you find some fish, catch a few, and then things slow down or stop. Maybe all the fish signals are gone. You had fish in the hole a minute ago, but now nothing. You have a favorite saying, “how long does it take to catch nothing?” What advice do you give when that happens?
A: Even if you had a Christmas tree (lots of fish signals) down there, and now they’re gone, you have to realize that they didn’t swim all the way across the lake. You can’t just give up, or wait for them to come back. Sometimes you can get in a good area and the fish will move through in waves, but I don’t usually sit there and wait for that to happen.
If you have other holes drilled, fish in them. Try to figure out what direction they went. Catching fish moves the other fish in the group. And there’s only so many biters. You have to keep moving, especially in the daytime, if you expect to catch more. Keep rocking that transducer in all the holes, and try to figure out where they went. Drill more holes. I’m not too patient out there. If I’m not catching fish, I have to move or I’m not happy.

Q: Because this is the first ‘real winter’ we’ve had in a while, and because this is the first real midwinter period we’ve had in a while, have you had to re-learn any important lessons about catching fish at this time?
A: These fish are on the move. You can’t expect to be able to go to the same holes where you caught ‘em yesterday and they’ll still be there. They might not be there. You can’t just say they’re not biting. The most important thing your Vexilar tells you is that fish are either down there or they aren’t, and you have to keep looking until you find them fish again.
And dealing with slush, that’s something we haven’t had to do much lately.

Q: Ah yes… the slush. Any words of wisdom for messing with the mess?
A: It definitely makes it harder to move, and harder to fish. On a lot of lakes that I’ve been on lately, it’s soup out there where you drilled holes the day before. You drill holes and the water comes up on the ice.
What I do is start fishing the edges of the slush. If we were catching fish in a certain area the day before, you want to go back into that same area, but it’s just easier not to fish right in the soup. If you get off to the edges it just makes it easier to move. It’s hard enough with deep snow, but deep slush is even worse. You gotta make it easier. If it’s easy to do, you’ll do it.

Q: Ah yes, again… that’s another one of our favorite Genz sayings… if it’s easy to do, you’ll do it. If it’s not, you won’t. That applies to everything from bringing too much gear, so your Fish Trap weighs too much to be moved easily, to not maintaining your auger so it starts easy, and right on down the line.
A: That’s why I bring my stuff into my motel room at night when I’m on the road. I untangle the lines, tie new knots, warm everything up, charge all the batteries, so it’s all ready for the next day. When the day of fishing is over, you still have to take care of your stuff.

Q: Can you talk for a minute on the search process for midwinter fish? For a lot of us, the task of searching across a big bay, or looking for suspended fish in basin water away from structural elements seems difficult if not impossible. Even just the depression in a big bay can be a lot of ground to cover. Give us some thoughts on how you approach this.
A: It is a process, and it really helps if you team up with a few friends and do it. A lot of people wait to find out where they’re biting, or go join the group. I like to be the one who figures out where they’re biting.

Q: You talk about football fields and tennis courts. In case somebody hasn’t heard about that concept, fill us in.
A: I like to take off on a straight line across the basin and drill a set of holes in every area the size of a football field, until we catch a few fish. Then, we drill a set of holes in every area the size of a tennis court, to try to get over the heart of the school.
One thing that probably gets missed is that pertains mainly to perch. A school of perch can be the size of a football field. If I’m bluegill or crappie or fishing, I don’t space the holes out quite that far (while searching). Those fish are not as big a roamers as the perch are. You can miss the whole works if you move the distance of a football field (between each set of holes).
Bluegills, a lot of times, move and swim slow, with their pectoral fins. Perch (and walleyes) swim by flapping their tails a lot more. And the pods of bluegills are a lot smaller, usually. A school of bluegills might be the size of my van (laughs). Bluegills are not as roamatic. Can that be a word for it?

Q: It is now. We’ll put it in the modern ice fishing dictionary. Keep going… tell us some more about crappies, another species that people like to hunt down at midwinter.
A: Crappies can be in big groups, but they’re also broken out in pods. There can be space between the pods, even though you might think of the whole thing as one big group. In one hole, a guy can be catching crappies, but other guys, even when they’re not very far away, don’t have any under them. Then, all of a sudden, (the crappies) in another hole, you have ‘em and they’re gone from the first guy’s hole.
Where you might be fishing with 8 guys and you’re all catching perch at the same time, in all the holes. I’ve experienced that many times. That, and you’re generally fishing big perch in a large body of water. If you’re looking for bluegills or crappies, you’re probably not in the middle of a 10,000-acre lake. We tend to fish bluegills in smaller bays, not the main basin of a big lake.

Q: And yet, even in the case of bluegills, or bluegills and crappies, you often have to get away from shoreline-connected structures at midwinter, during a year like this, right?
A: Right. Like at the Osakis (NAIFC event, held in early January) tournament, we were up in a narrows and a bay on the north end. The bluegills and crappies were set up in that bay, but they were away from obvious structure, out in the lake more. The weeds were brown and down, the bigger fish, the more aggressive fish, were definitely not up in them dying weeds.

Q: So let’s say one of our True Blue members wants to attack a new lake, in the middle of the winter, on a year like this. Just think out loud: what should they do?
A: For one thing, do the homework on the new lake. Pick a lake that has a big bay with maybe 20 feet of water. And then explore that bay. I wouldn’t pick a lake where the bay is 10 feet deep, or less, and you have to rely on good weeds. That’s not the kind of lake I would choose to fish right now.

Q: What about those shallow, prairie, dishpan lakes (a lake without much clearly-defined structure)? There are a lot of good ones. A lot of people live in areas where this is what they have available to them.
A: It gets tough on most of those lakes. (On a winter like this, with lots of snow cover) we lose a lot of our shallow lakes, because oxygen levels deplete. Because of the heavy snow, you see a lot of dying weeds. The fish are still there, but they quit feeding. If you’ve ever tried to catch fish out of a lake that they open up to promiscuous fishing (which local natural resources agencies sometimes do when low oxygen levels threaten to kill of most of the fish population), you know it’s really hard to make those fish bite. The fish are right up under the ice, trying to suck air bubbles to stay alive. Or they’re just sitting there, shut down.
We were at Metigoshe (in extreme north-central North Dakota) in early March a couple years ago, when there was a lot of snow on the ice, and we could see big ‘gills right under the ice but couldn’t make ‘em bite. We ended up over the deepest water in the lake and fished from just under the ice to about 5 feet down, and that’s where the fish were. We found a few that would bite, but most of those fish were in survival mode.
So, as the winter progresses (during a year like this), shallow lakes are not where I’m gonna spend my time.

Q: So tell us where you will spend your time, because this process is just beginning to happen, and will no doubt get more pronounced into February and March.
A: On bigger lakes with more deep water. Look for features (structure) around that deeper water, like humps. That’s where the burrowing insects can live, in the area around the hump. Some fish can be right up on top of the hump, or at the base, or in the area heading toward the basin. Look for anywhere there is even a slight rise (shallower water) in a big depression, which would indicate slightly firmer bottom, because that’s good for burrowing insects. I’m always drilling holes around those slight changes in depth, because that’s where those fish probably are.

Q: Let’s talk about presentation and bite detection. Working the baits and feeling the bites is one thing when we’re in 6 feet of water, but when we sink a jig down into 22 feet, there are a whole new set of challenges.
A: That’s why you have to have a good quality, graphite ice rod, and small jigs that fish heavy for their size. These fish are eating small things, so small baits are important, but you have to stay efficient while you’re searching and trying to catch them. You have to be able to get up and down quickly in the water column, and that’s why I’m always talking about you have to have small baits that fish heavy for their size, with lots of surface area, so they show up well on the Vexilar. The #10 Fat Boy with three maggots on it will catch almost anything, including big walleyes. You can get it up and down quickly, and you’ll catch bluegills or perch or crappies or whatever’s down there.
You can’t spend all day waiting for your small bait to sink down to where the fish are, so you can see if you can make ‘em bite. Get down there, and if they don’t bite, you’re off to the next hole. You have a lot of ground to cover and only so much daylight.
When you’re out there on the ice, even in a large bay, you can feel so small.

Q: What else? Any last thoughts?
A: When you don’t know where to start, just pick something. Anything that can help you be more comfortable, like following along the edge of a pressure ridge across a large flat. Just pick a direction and get started. Every set of holes you drill puts you closer to figuring it out.
And don’t forget that you won’t always catch a lot of fish out of one hole. Just because you find fish doesn’t mean you’re going to catch ‘em. If it’s an off day, when the fish are hard to coax into biting, you have to keep moving whenever things slow down. Keep looking for the ones that want to bite.
If there’s a lot of slush on the ice, getting stuck is an issue. An ATV or truck can easily get stuck in the slush or deeper snow. A snowmobile, like my Bearcat, has a better chance, but even they can get stuck in the slush.
Go with people who can help you. Don’t get too far into the slush by yourself.
And when you’re fishing that deeper water, one of the methods we use is to re-bait often and throw the old bait in the hole. It sinks down nice slow. This is after we found the fish. If you keep a steady flow of old bait sinking down there, it can keep those fish down there. The longer they stick around, the better chance you have to keep catching.

Notes: Our thanks, as always, to Dave Genz for sharing his hard-won secrets with anybody who wants to catch fish consistently. During the winter of ‘08-’09, because of the relatively heavy snowfall in many parts of the Ice Belt, it will be more important than ever to practice the Genz system. Midwinter fish will become difficult to find, and catch, on a lot of lakes.
Unless you get lucky, you will have to practice the Genz method of mobility with a purpose. Nobody gets lucky all the time. The modern ice fishing revolution is all about putting the odds on your side, so you stand a better chance of catching what you go after.
Be the aggressive, mobile ice angler. Go with friends, so you can help each other if you get stuck in the slush. Drill lots of holes. Be efficient. Have fun. Remember that there are only so many biters in any pod of fish. Let lots of fish go, because you know you can do it all again tomorrow, on purpose.
Midwinter is going to be a challenge. But you can be successful!