Holiday fishing.

Twelve available fishing days during Christmas vacation and six days on the ice.  Mackay Reservoir treated us very well on both days there.  Took a son-in-law and a grandson there.  We caught trout and kokanee there.  We used my flasher-jig setup for kokanee.  Here Brandon lands one of the small kokanee we caught.

You can see our setup for the kokanee in the picture.  I tye the jig and tip it with a wax worm or piece of nightcrawler.  The kokanee are withing a foot of the bottom no matter what depth of water we were in.

Mud Lake was still dead and we took all the grandchildren to Roberts Pond to catch small perch.  They had a lot of fun, but nothing of any size.

Island Park Reservoir was good to me as I caught rainbows and a couple of nice kokanee there.  I used the same setup as I did for kokanee.  The area by the dam is my favorite area.

Henrys Lake for the one day season on New Year's Day was not good.  I predicted in my newspaper article that it would probably be slow and it was.  My son-in-law, Steve, and I each caught one brook trout.

Tomorrow is back to school, but what a way to spend a couple of weeks in the wilds of Idaho.

Ice fishing Island Park Res.

Yesterday I fished Island Park Reservoir through the ice.  I caught two 12 inch planters, but that is all in three hours of fishing.  I visited with eight other fishermen and they didn't catch any fish at all.  I got my two right at daylight and everyone came later.

Several fishermen said they had good luck last week at the West End, but the snow has made the road impassable.  Fishermen with fish finders reported fish swimming by, but not biting.  I had trouble keeping bait on my jigs because the minnows would strip it off.

Not good at all.

Just a lot of standing around in freezing rain.  But the ice is over 2 feet thick.  Better luck next time.