Brandon Stranton, one of the best-known and most-experienced ice fishing guides on the bay with a dandy walleye!
I certainly haven’t fished for walleyes through the ice everywhere that’s an option, but it’s pretty hard for me to believe there’s anywhere that’s any better than Saginaw Bay. I’ve been ice fishing for ‘eyes on the bay for about 30 years, a day or two or three (and sometimes more) most years, and it’s pretty unusual not to catch at least a few fish and often a pretty good sack of them.
Saginaw Bay can be intimidating for beginners. There are a million acres of water out there and if you don’t have an idea of where to start, it seems inconceivable that you’ll just stumble upon them. But the truth is, there are so many fish in Saginaw Bay that it can happen almost anywhere.
Early in the season (i.e., first ice), you can find them in shallow water, but most of the time it’s a pretty short bite, at least that’s the word from Brandon Stranton, one of the best-known and most-experienced ice fishing guides on the bay.
“They’re finicky in that shallow water,” Stanton said. “Usually, there are a couple of short windows to catch them in shallow water. The witching hour is first thing in the morning or again late in the evening.
“Usually, we catch a few bigger fish at early ice,” Stanton said. “Early ice produces some pretty good fish.”
Good fish aren’t as easy to come by as they were in the early to mid ‘90s, when eight- to 10-pound specimens (or even bigger) were fairly common, but that’s simply because there are so many fish in the bay now that they’re on shorter rations. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I was on the ice with a couple of guys a couple of years back when one of my buddies hauled in an honest 12-pounder. So, they’re still there, but not in the numbers they once were.
As the season progresses and the ice becomes stronger, the fishing only gets better. When you can get out to 20 feet of water (or more) you can catch them all day long (though first light and last light are still the best bites).
“You get more chances out in the deeper water,” Stanton says. “The water’s got more of a green color to it out there — it’s crystal clear in shallow, so the fish are less spooky. That’s why everybody tries to get out to the shipping channel.”
But you’re not going to walk out there. Quads or snowmobiles are de rigueur. And that’s a challenge if you don’t know where you’re going. Cracks in the ice can open at any time and as winter progresses and heaves begin to appear, it can sometimes require huge detours to get around them to get to where you want to go.
Mark Martin, Michigan’s best-known walleye fisherman, is a big fan of Saginaw Bay, but he minces no words about getting started on Saginaw Bay.
“I would recommend you get a guide,” Martin said. “It can be dangerous. A crack opens up overnight and it refreezes, but there’s only an inch of ice, and maybe it’s got a little snow on it, and the next thing you know, you’re in the water. If you don’t know what to look for and you just go out there, you might not come back.
“Get a guide and you’re going to get out there and you’re going to get back. You can be out there and all of a sudden, there’s a whiteout and a lot of wind and cracks start opening up.
“Besides, a guide’s going to put you on fish and show you the techniques that are producing.”
As for where you want to go, Stanton recommends a little fishing 101 – look for changes in the bottom contour. And that’s a problem, as the bay is sort of a bowl; you’re not likely to find the dramatic drop-offs that you find on other bodies of water.
“We don’t have huge contours,” Stanton said. “A two-foot drop may be quite a bit.”
Personally, if I’m not out there with someone who’s on fish, I like to set up near the ice heaves. While I don’t know it for sure, I’ve always suspected that there was something going on on the bottom – a break line, an upheaval, or something — that was causing the ice to heave in that particular area. Typically, we catch fish there.
“The biggest thing is putting in your time,” Stanton said. “You kind of learn the fish migrations in and out of the Bay, so you know where those fish should be.”
Fishing can get tough in late winter – as it does everywhere else. Last winter, I went out with Stanton on a freezing cold late February day, and Stanton told me the fishing had been slow lately, as we set up in 30 feet of water. He told me he’d been out with a guy shooting a TV show a few days earlier and he put a camera down and the water temperature at the bottom was 32.5 degrees.
“To me, that’s thick water,” Stanton said. “Cold. They’d come flying in and then hit the brakes as hard as they could at the last second and then they’d just swim away.
‘In January they bit better, but they’re always good at first ice. By February, you’ve got thick ice, and there were no cracks or heaves this year, so there was no oxygen. To me, that was part of their negativity.”
Still, we caught fish. I caught the first two pretty quickly, fishing a Moonshine spoon tipped with a small minnow, seeing them on the sonar and bringing them up in the water column until they bit. But after that, it slowed significantly over the next five hours, and I went blank for hours. Stanton, who was fishing his go-to bait – a lead-head jig tipped with a minnow – caught the next five. But that was it. I had one more bite, a nice fish that I hooked on a jigging Rapala right on the bottom, but as I brought it to the hole, one of the hooks on the end of the bait snagged the ice and the fish got off. (I hate it when that happens.) Still seven fish in the middle of the doldrums, that isn’t bad, is it?
But I never got out for late (or last) ice last year, which I’ve found over the years, is often excellent. The fish begin moving back into the shallows – by then, there’s generally open water out deeper – and you can find big pods of fish in five or six feet of water. It can be rapid fire – I can remember a day a few years back – when the limit was still five daily – when I had mine within an hour after getting started.
The key to me, when fishing last ice, is to get away from the crowd. The fish are spooky in shallow water and the noise or vibration of a snowmobile going by can shut the bite off like flipping a switch.
But by then, the ice is off the Saginaw River and it’s time to get back in a boat again, anyway.
