In Southern Michigan today's low is 0. Seems measly compared to your -17! Later this week it'll heat up for us. :)

Here and gone! We were at -12 yesterday morning at my house, -2 this morning. At least we only got 2" of snow but that was after a nice glazing of ice that caused some trouble on Friday. After today we are predicted to be at or above freezing for daytime highs thru New Years with a balmy 51 and rain on Xmas day. Stay warm and have fun catching the Crappie! The challenge is keeping them from freezing solid until you clean them.

LOL I catch and release everything here around the city. The trick is keeping released panfish away from the ******* muskies that they stocked around here into any water deep enough to float one. I am not a fan of the big tooth carps. Pike are another matter; they are native around here, and the panfish have evolved in concert with them. Muskies are simply too big for the waters we have.

We got close to -20 Sunday, but today it is +20 a full 40 degree flip flop. We are even supposed to get above freezing tomorrow. Up here if you don't like the weather, stick around for a couple of hours and it will change. :-)

If Sunday is all the colder it gets this winter, it will be a relatively mild one. I mean only a very few years ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to plant anything in the garden in November, but I sure did this year.

We only had 12F here. The polar vortex only brushed us. Hope it passes out of your woods soon!

Hey Mav up here they have a bikini ice fishing team! Of course it's a gimmick and the gals wear real warm boots, but not much else. There is always a warm fishing shack close by though...

Bikini ice fishing? Hmmm I don't know how some gals walk around in the cold with hardly anything on. I also don't understand why stores sell ice fishing gear in my area when nothing ever freezes. Lol I love fishing too though. I C&R anything close to downtown, although there was a guy who would keep sewer lobsters. Yuck! Right now in the cooler months, we fish for various types of surfperch, which are fish that have a tipical pan fish body. That and some croaker species, which are called drums on the east coast. Cooked in a broth with some ginger, tomatoes, and onion leaves on a cold day? So good...

Got any pictures of those ice fishing gals Dutch? I remember going ice fishing with my older brother's scout troop on Eagle Lake and Fish Lake in the NW part of the metro back in the late 60s when I was a young pup. I think most of the time was spent making the holes in the ice. No power augers back then. I've seen some of those 'ice fishing shacks' with generator power, TVs, ect. Some of the bigger lakes look like small towns in the winter with all of the fishing shacks.

We have a few reservoirs here in Missouri that they stock Tiger Muskie in which is a cross between a Northern Pike and a Muskie and can get to 30+ lbs. I've never caught one...I don't have the patients to catch a fish of 10,000 casts.

Cmon Jack do your own googling... (and oogling if that is what trips your trigger. LOL) I don't fish for muskies at all but hook up to a couple up to 40" every year just fishing crappies. IMO they are overrated; carp are a lot more fun to fight pound for pound and so are pike, largemouths and smallmouths, all of which are available here in the metro without the expense of stocking.

I use some ice fishing jigs on open water, for vertical jigging like around dock pilings, see-sawing under a slip bobber. etc. I take quite a few crappies that way. That should work real well jigging stump fields, too, but that is down south, not so much available around here and I don't have a boat anyway. At times the tiny little ice plastics save the day when the bite is real fussy. I fish soft baits almost exclusively - haven't bought a minnow for fishing in years. Some waxies and some spikes -yes. Minnows not.

I thinned out my bunch onions today. I'm gonna fry the harvested ones in egg tempura tomorrow. It's the first day of winter but a warm storm front came in from the south. The next one for Saturday is coming from the cold north.

We use crappie gear for surfperch. We use a C-rig with a 2" plastic grub tail on the hook. Colors being usually hot pink (looks orange), pumpkin seed, motor oil, to smoke grey. They represent the crustations the surfperch eat. My older brother loves fishing crappie out on our local lakes in January. They're mostly black crappie. Good size and delicious. The some lakes encourage keeping your catch, as long a your fish is within the size/take limit. The way my brother rigs his line looks similar to how you describe yours with a slip bobber. He uses various plastics but I don't know what all the designs are called. Colores that seem to work around here are white, a pinkish pearl white, and sometimes "john deere".

Lol Maybe the muskies don't realize they are hooked. I've had large hooked halibut easily come to the surface but once they saw me, all hell would break loose and they would take off like a bat outta hell. It's so much fun though.

LOL Dutch, the ice fishing girls look pretty cold. I think I see some goose bumps!!

mav - I love Halibut! Send one my way would ya! It is too expensive here in the plains to eat very often. My brother used to go Halibut fishing a lot up in Alaska and he'd give me a few pounds every year but he hasn't gone recently.

To be sure a hooked musky will often come up and actually look at you, especially the big ones. They know they are hooked, but when they feel the stretch in crappie weight lines they tend to go for the cut off rather than cutting out for the next county. Such a fight can take 15 to 20 minutes and more if one has the hook set in the top jaw, where the tooth carps can't get a cutoff.

They recommend keeping legal crappies in the winter, since so many of them go too deep then to survive release. IIRC anything over about 25' and the crappies released may swim away, but no matter how carefully handled very close to 100% soon die. They get their equivalence of the bends I guess. In some places keeping every one caught during the winter is the law.

Edit: BTW it got up to +40 degrees here yesterday. Boy is the water running.

They are now forecasting thunderstorms for Christmas Day here in central Minnesota with the possibility of flooding. Never a dull moment.

Wow interesting about the crappie.

We're wating for a storm this minute.. It's already 3 hours overdue. Christmas is supposed to be clear for is but relatively cold.

Jack, a lot of seafood is really cheap up in the Pacific Northwest. You cant beat a big bag of oysters for five bucks or three large salmon for eleven bucks. It's funny how expensive oceanic seafood gets the further inland you go. I was visiting some relatives in the desert once and their market had fresh mackerel for sale for 3 bucks a pound. Here in the summer, you couldn't give those things away.

"I was visiting some relatives in the desert once and their market had
fresh mackerel for sale for 3 bucks a pound. Here in the summer, you
couldn't give those things away."

(lol) That's funny, because it is so true. I used to catch mackerel when I lived in San Diego, while waiting for something better to start biting. Run into a good school, you can catch 100 in an hour! I was usually bottom fishing when the mackerel came in... couldn't get the bait to hit bottom. They would even bite bare hooks.

I was in the Navy at the time, and often fished off the back of the boat on my duty days. After a couple years, I found that if I kept the mackerel in a frenzy by chumming, halibut would swim in from the surrounding area to check out the commotion. I got pretty good at catching halibut; kind of like the musky phenomenon, but with a happier ending. Halibut sells for about $20.00 a pound here, I figure the family & I ate several thousand dollars worth. Good times.

Oh, I suppose I should add that if the mackerel were good sized, we often ate some. DW would marinade them for a day in tomatoes & garlic, bake them in the marinade, and they turned out pretty good. See, garlic had something to do with this thread after all. ;-)

My dad learned to fish with a rod n reel on the back of the boat in his navy days. Thats how we got turned on to fishing. I hear those old Navy piers are still VERY productive. No fishing pressure at all. Lobster trapping was my parents favorite thing to do though.

Yea, with mackerel, you just have to prep and cook it right and you've got a good meal there.

"Yea, with mackerel, you just have to prep and cook it right and you've got a good meal there."

That... and throw them on ice while they are still flapping. The flesh deteriorates quickly if allowed to heat up.

Holy Mackerel Batman! The only fish I've caught out of the ocean was flounder. Kind of like a miniature Halibut. I'll have to stick to the inland Crappie, Walleye, and Catfish for my table fare.

Winter has crept back into Missouri and we are down into the teens for highs and single digit lows thru the weekend. 1-3" of snow expected overnight tonight. Next week will be back up in the 40s and 50s for highs. I can take winter a little at a time.

Now back to Alliums. I started onions from seed on December 31. ~70 Pontiac, ~70 Red Marble Cipolinni, and around 200 Evergreen White bunching onions. No germination as of last night but I expect to see a few sprouting this evening. I'll start some King Richard and Bandit leeks on January 14.

Old Dutch - As a young man in Texas I made and sold ice to all of those humble laborers who toiled outside in the hot Texas sun. Without the ice water they had a hard time working is such heat. I take it you don't have that problem in Minneapolis?

Charlie - back in the day Minnesota ( and other frigid northern states) was where a lot of the ice came from for 'Ice boxes'. They would cut the ice in blocks from the frozen lakes and store them in saw dust in big barns thru the warm months. This allowed transportation of western beef to the big eastern cities in railcars and people to keep their beer cold :)

Minnesota can get somewhat hot in the summer but usually no long hot spells. I think their lake water warms enough to swim in for about 2 weeks in late July.

When I was a kid, they were still harvesting ice blocks from Lake Winnebago in the winter. The ice is about 8-9" thick now, it'll be thick enough to drive on soon. I taught all
my children to drive when they were in their tweens, by taking them out
onto the lake; nothing to run into, and no license required. Needless to say, they had fun; and I think they are better drivers today, having first learned to drive on ice.

Lake
Winnebago is kind of like "Shangri-la County" when it freezes over... 215 square miles of 'land' that only exists for a couple months a year.

Yeah, the lakes here warm up late - at which point they turn green. ;-) Good boating, but its like swimming in soup.