The Hunt for 'eyes...Applying Electronics to ice fishing

It is safe to say that no other group of ice fishermen log as many days on a frozen lake as a group of guides out of Devils Lake, North Dakota, known as the "Perch Patrol Guide Service." This team of fishing guides will spend practically every day on Devils Lake from freeze up until the beginning of April. Don't get me wrong, I love to fish, but after a single weekend of dedicated ice fishing I am worn out. I can't even imagine such a marathon of ice fishing.The Perch Patrol's season becomes a grueling grind of drilling holes; dealing with different people and watching hot bites fizzle away.These guides describe their life on the ice as a roller coaster ride; they know what it is like to dial into a hot bite, to deal with tough bites head on and they know ice fishing from the bootstraps up. The Perch Patrol has seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Day after day, winter after winter, some men take a lunch box or brief case to work. These guys pack a FL-18 and a frozen lake becomes their office.The countless days on a frozen lake have made this group of ice fishermen extremely experienced and humble to a fault. The experience these guys possess about ice fishing and Devils Lake itself is amazing to a casual weekend angler like me.While the Perch Patrol Guide Service built its reputation for finding and catching jumbo perch, these guys are usually dialed into other species as well, such as northern pike and walleyes. Time spent on the water has given this group of anglers an incredible mental picture of what types of structure lay below. They can drive out to the middle of nowhere, open the door and drill a hole and be sitting right on top of a rock pile that hasn't seen a fisherman all winter. The wealth of spots these guys know is amazing. When it comes to walleye fishing on Devils Lake I learned that nothing becomes more important than the "spot."Finding these "spots" is the key to the Perch Patrol's amazing success at finding the walleyes Devils Lake is famous for. Learning the characteristics of each rock pile, every flooded timberline and virtually every other structural element present in the lake actually begins months before first ice for this group of winter fishing fanatics.Some members of the Perch Patrol spend the summer months farming while other members make their living guiding on Devils Lake year round and spend well over two hundred days on Devils Lake each year. The guides who keep guiding during the open water season form "Mitchell's Guide Service," headquartered out of Woodland Resort and the Spirit Lake Casino and Resort. Chances are, you have probably heard of Woodland Resort's awesome reputation for summer guide trips or maybe you have seen the walls at the bait shop covered with picture after picture of incredible days on the water. Well, some of these same guys are also part of Devils Lake's famed Perch Patrol.When the lake finally freezes, you can bet these guys have a pretty good idea where to start looking for fish. Many of the Perch Patrol's most coveted walleye hot beds are actually found with a boat, months beforehand. Rock piles, break lines, changes in bottom composition or anything else deemed attractable to old marble eye is logged and saved into GPS systems. In the winter, these guides will take the GPS units out of their boats and mount them right on their vehicle's dash. Some of the guides actually have GPS receivers mounted right to the roofs of their pickup cabs.The Perch Patrol often finds walleyes relating to weed beds; flooded timber or hard bottom areas consisting of either boulders or rock. The fish are often relatively shallow during first ice. You can bet that the edges of these productive weed beds or openings in the flooded timber along with many of the small rock piles hidden around the lake have been programmed into a GPS months before these ice fishermen hit Devils Lake on ice. Many of these small secrets are much easier to find with a boat and a GPS enables you to return months later.This ability to go right to the spot and fish the key structure maximizes the time these guides have to find and catch fish. To catch fish, you have to be in the right spot and the "sweet spot" on any piece of structure walleyes are using becomes even more obvious through the ice.Once these anglers find their honey holes with a GPS, a Vexilar FL-18 is used to examine the area even further. Devils Lake walleyes will hold to structure until fishing pressure causes them to move. "The first crack at many of these spots are often the best," explains Jason Mitchell, Perch Patrol guide, "the fish usually seem to get smaller after an area gets fished hard but resting many of these areas seems to rejuvenate them."It becomes really apparent that an angler needs a rotation of good spots to consistently catch walleyes through the ice on a large natural lake like Devils Lake. "It becomes really important to always be working fresh spots for walleyes and that is where our GPS units really help," describes Mitchell. "Looking at the waypoints all over the screen often reminds us of spots we sometimes forget about and enable us to find and fish more spots that are hard to find." Once you get a long enough list of productive spots you can hit, you can rest past productive spots and let nice fish move back in and once a location is punched in, you never forget.The Perch Patrol Guide Service often has location wired down to the point of marking certain holes. There are times when one side of a certain boulder may be productive, for example, or perhaps the tiny inside corner of a weed bed might be the hot ticket. These guys will often mark a hole indiscreetly so they can find and drill out the same hole, weeks later.As you can see, ice fishing for walleyes for this group of fishermen is more than just driving out to the largest group of fish houses or hitting the community holes. A lesson we learned is to take the technology and knowledge you acquire while fishing in a boat and use this equipment and experience all year long. Remember that the bottom of the lake looks the same whether there is ice or no ice. You can bet that many of the little tucked away secrets on your favorite walleye lake also happen to hold fish under the ice as well.