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when in search mode unless you are extremely lucky. My

best strategy for finding fish is making big moves, often
traveling two to three hundred yards between holes and
spending more time in a hole, perhaps ten to fifteen
minutes. By spreading your holes and settling into your
holes longer, you also give fish a little bit of time to wander
underneath you if you are in a productive area. This style
allows you to break down bigger pieces of water and allows
you to cover miles of water over the course of the day when

you are starting from scratch.

Once we zero in on a general area, this is the time to get
more aggressive and drill a grid through an area where you
can aggressively move from hole to hole and contact fish.

This is where the small moves catch fish. Small moves or
drilling out a small area is terrible for finding fish on a big
lake but is the very best way to produce fish once you find
them.

There are many factors to try and wrap your head around when dialing in patterns but perhaps the

most important factor is how to drill out a location and the overall strategy of using your auger to catch
fish. Perch can be in one massive school that is moving a general direction or the school can be several
small pods or waves of fish that are traveling a general direction. On some fisheries, perch will school in
a column where they stack up on top of each other and move very fast. These vertical schools are
typically very aggressive fish and these fish will often climb much higher in the water column. There are
also times where perch will seldom stack up vertically and instead school up where the fish swim side by

side and you seldom have more than three fish on the Vexilar at one time. These horizontal schooling
fish are often less aggressive and sprawl out over a larger area. Generally, if you can get fish to stack up
on top of each other and get multiple fish below you… these fish are much easier to catch.

How the fish are schooling can really influence your overall strategy. If you are dealing with perch that
are sprawled out over a general area, you can sit over one hole and just wait for these waves of fish to

pass underneath. If you get a school of fish to pass by every ten to twenty minutes, you can add them
up to a great day. When fish are traveling fast in a column, you often need to be much more aggressive
and land on them for short periods of time where your windows are going to be intense. You might
only keep these fish under you for ten minutes at a time before you lose them but if you get two or
three cracks at these fish in a day, you can tally several fish in a short amount of time.

Understanding some of these factors can help you make much better decisions on the ice when
targeting perch at late ice. Your process of looking for perch and how to target these fish once you find
them in all reality trumps everything else. What you do with your auger can often be much more
important than presentation details. Late ice is perhaps one of the most coveted periods of time for ice
anglers targeting perch. When breaking down large basins and flats that can be somewhat
intimidating… big moves find fish but the small moves catch them.

Jason Mitchell Outdoors can be found on Sunday mornings at 9:00 am on Fox Sports North.

Past episodes can be found online at www.jasonmitchelloutdoors.com