[PECo]

Now, you might think that I should have learned my lesson after losing an oil pan to Nod Brook and having to shovel my car out of there several times. But I'm dumber than you can imagine. I was planning to take the bitterly cold and windy day off from fishing, but when jonnyfly00 (aka Jon aka Shelly) texted me at 11:00 am that he had gotten off from work early and wanted to fish, I suggested Nod Brook. We met in the parking lot at the entrance to the park at 12:15 pm. After we loaded Jon's stuff into my little Saab, we headed down the twin-rutted ice luge into the park. We never got stuck, but decided to park at the top of the hill before the final steep descent to the ponds. And only one piece of my Saab's undercarriage fell off!

We crunched our way over the frozen snow and down to the upper pond. The area of open water where the stream flows into the northwest corner of the pond is bigger than it used to be, so we headed halfway down the north shore before getting onto the ice. Man, it was nice to walk on ice, again, instead of slogging through snow or slush! The pond was covered with white ice (i.e., the kind with tiny bubbles in it). Although it was pretty bumpy in spots, it was definitely smooth and solid enough for skating. We decided to set our tip-ups to the south of the second island and started drilling holes with Jon's six inch hand auger. Each hole took 60 to 70 cranks to get through the 18 to 20 inches of ice. Some areas had two layers of ice with a couple inches of slush in between, but others had solid ice all the way through. I gotta say that I prefer solid ice. Slushy layers can cause an auger to bind up a little. We each set five tip-ups, but including our jigging holes, we each drilled nine or 10 holes. We didn't get our tip-ups baited and set until 1:15 pm. It was a lot of work.

I got the first fish when I jigged up a yellow sunny. Although our tip-ups were set toward the middle of the pond, the jigging holes that produced sunnies were only 40 to 50 feet from the east shore of the pond. All told, Jon and I each jigged up 12 to 15 sunnies. I used one of the micro jigs that had gotten me a couple dozen yellow perch at Papermill Pond. Jon had a lot of success with a perch eye jig, but missed a lot of hooksets. When he got his first sunny, he did a Kevin VanDam-style hookset and lost his grip on the rod at the top. I thought that he was going to knock the glasses right off of his face. Waxies definitely outperformed spikes, but Jon found that a combination of a waxie and a mealworm worked best for him.

Flagwise, Jon got the first one at about 2:30 pm on the first tip-up that we set, which was close to the east side of the second island. Line was still spooling off when Jon tried to set the hook, but he missed it. When he baited the tip-up, he had dorsal hooked a small minnow. The fish had grabbed the head of the minnow and swam away with it, but avoided the hook completely. Sound familiar, Dawg? We're pretty sure that the fish was a chain pickerel, but it could have been one of those "rumored-to-be-in-there" trout. Here's a video that I shot shortly afterward:


Link

Other than the missed hookset, we had no activity on the tip-ups for most of the day. It was so slow that Jon moved a few of his tip-ups to the jigging holes we had drilled closer to the east shore. However, at 4:15 pm, flags started flying on the tip-ups in the middle of the pond. I got the next one and pulled up a 20 inch, one pound 14 ounce pickerel. It had swallowed the minnow and I was afraid that I'd have to cut the line and leave the hook in it. But just as I was giving up on getting the hook out, I pulled the entire minnow, hook and all, back out of the pickerel's gullet. While I was futzing with it, Jon yelled that there was another flag and pulled up an 11 inch pickerel. Unfortunately, since both of us had slime covered hands, we didn't get any photos of either pickerel, but they were both healthy looking fish. After we re-set both tip-ups, Jon spotted another flag, but missed the hookset. He said that it felt like a pretty substantial fish before it let go, but we'll never know.

We started to pack up at 5:20 pm and were back at Jon's car by 5:45 pm. Although Jon experienced a few periods of painfully frozen fingers, I never really got worse than pins and needles all day. The last few times that Jon fished at Nod Brook, the fish didn't bite. At all. The best thing about today is that we found they've obviously started biting again. I'm still looking forward to ice out, but days like today make the waiting pretty bearable.
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Don't forget to wear sunscreen and don't litter!

[DirtyDawg10]

Sounds like a good time catching. As far as the minnow and dorsal hooking...the more I think about it I'm thinking if a fish can't get the whole minnow in its mouth enough to swallow a hook in its dorsal it probably wasn't big enough to worry about. The 12" fallfish and 13" yellow perch that I caught at Nod Brook my first time on the ice this year both swallowed a dorsal hooked medium minnow.