Page 47 - ODUNovAndDec2018

Marking weed edges, wood piles and rock structures before first ice provides key perspective that

guides his decisions while he’s standing on the lake. Again, it’s time management, born of
understanding.

“When we’re ice fishing, we don’t have the ability to scan, we have to just go and drill holes and you
have to be right on top of spots,” Peterson said. “That’s the beauty of using the Auto Charts Live
feature.”

For optimal imaging,

Peterson offers these
tips:

“I’ve found that on
certain types of water,
you need to play with

the settings a little
more,” he says. “If you
have murky water or
really clear water,
settings are a big deal.
I’ll play with the
contrast a lot to try and
identify the types of

species that are mixed
in with the bait.

“We have walleye, pike
and bass mixed in with
these bait pods. Once
you get good at it, you can determine the actual species of fish by the soundings you’re getting.

Darkening up the contrast and increasing the gain a little bit will give you better definition.”

TARGET ACQUIRED

Once Peterson locates the crappie-friendly structure, he takes a simple, yet undeniably effective
approach to tempting the fish. Inspired by old-school cane poling, Peterson equips uses a telescoping
14- to 16-foot pole rigged with 8- to 10 Seaguar AbrazX fluorocarbon to deploy a minnow on a No. 2
long shank Tru-Turn hook with a 1/4-ounce weight, all under a slip bobber.

“On the river system, crappies tuck behind brushpiles and vertical structure like dock posts and stumps,
staying out of the current and just sucking in anything that gets eddied back into where they’re hiding.

“There’s nothing more effective than cane poling and dropping your bait directly on top of them
without worrying about casting to them or feeding the line back. You want to get your bait as
close to that vertical structure because eddies suck whatever they’re eating to the back side of