How to trigger fish bites in the forward-facing sonar era

These days, most ice anglers are incorporating forward-facing sonar and cameras into their respective programs, and this helps them find fish that aren’t relating to cover.

Species that emerge on the sonar and camera screens are crappies, walleyes, perch, and the roaming pike, bluegills, and bass when they’re not hiding in wilting vegetation.

The new sonar units are great for finding suspended fish, but you still have to get them to bite.

I will admit that finding fish has always been easy for only about 10% of the anglers who ventured onto the ice. But this new technology makes it a different game for the other 90% who often had fished over empty holes. Locations that no one would ever consider great real estate for finding good numbers of fish have proved to be honey holes.

So now everyone can be atop fish, and what they are discovering is that those crappies, walleyes, perch, pike, and bass aren’t always hungry. In the past, when an angler didn’t catch fish, he figured the fish weren’t biting and blamed it on the fish, even though he was probably fishing empty water.

Now that anglers know the fish are down below, when they don’t get bites they have only themselves to blame. They were there. They just couldn’t figure out how to trigger a bite.

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The key component here is “trigger,” because when fish aren’t in the mood, you no longer are trying to feed them; you’re trying to get them to inspect the lure you’re dangling in front of them.

Triggering a bite is much easier when you have a camera down the hole in the ice. You can watch how the fish react to your lure presentation and make modifications to trigger fish. But then, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

First, you need to incorporate a fluorocarbon leader into your presentation. This leader material can be a lot stiffer than monofilament line, so use the lightest possible diameter to get the best action on your lure.

Fluorocarbon line is virtually invisible in the water, and even the most line-shy fish can be tempted when they can’t see the leader.

When triggering a bite, you often use lures that are big and flashy and have some good action on the drop. You’re limited to a small hole, so the drop is often when a fish bite is triggered.

Jigging spoons, jigging minnows, jigs with big plastic bodies, and glow lures all look good on the drop. We can use these lures as decoys to attract fish to a bait that is hanging within striking distance from the jigging lures. I’ll explain that later.

So now you have found a school of suspended fish with your forward-facing sonar and you’ve lowered the camera down. It’s just what you thought. A school of walleyes, or maybe a big ball of crappies with some sunfish in the mix. You send down the jig tipped with bait, they swim up to it, take a sniff, and swim away. Time to trigger.

For walleyes, drop that big, flashy jigging spoon down and start ripping it, letting it settle with some twitching. After a few minutes, switch to the jigging minnow and rip it off the bottom a few times to stir up some sand and mud.

Watch to see if fish move to the lures you’re jigging hard and look for the ones that seem curious. When they move up to the lure and wonder what it is, they’ll grab it and you set the hook.

For crappies, bluegills, and perch, send down the small jigging minnow and rip it, jig it, and let it swim in circles beneath the hole. You’ll find that there are fish that just have to know what this crazy minnow is up to, and they’ll suck it into their mouth. Set the hook.

Sometimes, all the action will get the fish excited, but they still won’t sample the lures. The jigs and spoons have just become decoys to keep the fish under the hole, and you can send a maggot, wax worm, or minnow down and twitch it in front of their noses to get them to commit.

Many times, getting that first fish to bite will get the others in the mood and more will activate. That is the goal now. In the past, the hardest part of fishing was finding those schools of fish. You can do this much more easily now with the available technology, but you still have to get them to bite.