Ice Fishing Vermont January 8 2017

This past weekend, we started off our ice fishing tournament series with the Champlain Valley Hardwater Series in Vermont. This is our second season and after last season, we were very excited at getting back up there and seeing and fishing with so many friends. This series is growing with each tournament and is becoming a very popular event with a number of different states being represented. Everyone is super friendly and always willing to lend a helping hand and make you f...eel welcome to being a part of this community. This first event was held on a setback of the Connecticut River which is known for having nice sized panfish. Pre-fishing for us was tough, as this was a new body of water for us and spent most of that time, looking at what the different areas consisted of. Our main location that we concentrated on during the tournament, had a depth of 4-7 feet of water with good concentrations of weeds with a few areas of clear sand spots. My son had the hot hand right from the start and before I had my first keeper fish, he already had 3 in the bucket. You had to keep moving around the weed beds while watching the Vexilar Inc flasher and with the power setting on low power, this allowed you to distinguish the difference between the weeds and the fish that were inside of the weeds. Every now and then you would go and check the sand spots and typically catch a decent bluegill. The bait that worked the best for us was the Clam Outdoors Drop-Kick Jig and tipped that with a variety of grubs. As the day wore on, we were able to upgrade all of our fish and for us the bigger fish came in the middle of the day. Our biggest bluegill was .75 of a pound and we had a six fish limit of 3.40 pounds which put us in 16 place out of 44 teams. We were happy with our results, as our pre-fish was dismal, but, that is why every day is a new day when it comes to fishing. We had a lot of fun with everyone and always look forward to making our way back to Vermont and fishing with our ice fishing family. We want to send out our congratulations to the top 3 teams and also to the big fish winner. This tournament series should be looked at by anyone in the New England region that wants to get into competitive ice fishing, while having a lot of fun at the same time. Biggest fish was a crappie at 1.45 pounds