NAIFC

Joe Pikulski and Myron Gilbert

Written BY ERIC SHARP • FREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER • January 1, 2009

When the North American Ice Fishing Championships was held at Boom Lake, Wisconsin, 42 out of the 80 two-angler teams caught a limit of 32 fish over two days. So what did Michigan anglers Joe Pikulski and Myron Gilbert do differently to win the event by a mere 1 3/4 ounces?
“When we fish a hole, we take the first two, three fish then move to the next one,” said Gilbert, a Brooklyn resident who, in the summer, fishes for Lake Erie walleyes out of Luna Pier and Lake Michigan salmon out of Ludington aboard his charter boat, Catchin’.

“It doesn’t matter if we’re still getting fish — the first two or three are always the biggest and strongest, so once you’ve got them, you go to the next hole.”

Not that the next hole may be very far away. Gilbert said he and his partner usually drilled 300 to 350 holes during a five-hour, one-day tournament, spacing them across the ice according to the water clarity.

“It depends on how far away a fish can see your bait,” Gilbert said. “If the fish can see your bait 5 feet away, you drill the holes 10 feet apart. If they can see the bait 15 feet away, drill the holes 30 feet apart. By doing that you can cover a lot of water, and you’ll get the biggest, most aggressive fish.”

Gilbert and Pikulski, who in the summer runs a charter boat called Temptation, are among four teams of anglers who will be featured in the new “Ice Men” cable TV show that debuts on The Sportsman Channel this month. It follows the teams through several tournaments and shows the techniques they use to catch fish under conditions both good and bad.

Teams from Michigan took five of the top 10 places at the North American championships, and Gilbert thinks that’s because ice fishing is tougher here than in many of the richer lakes in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

“We usually have to work a lot harder to catch fish, and I think it makes us better fishermen,” he said.

That dedication also earned Gilbert and Pikulski sponsorship from Suzuki (four wheelers), Ice Gator power augers, Marcum electronics, Fiska Jigs and Little Adam ice tails.

One of the “Ice Men” shows will be made at Devil’s Lake in southern Michigan during the North American Ice Fishing Circuit event held there Feb. 1. But even though these are home waters, Gilbert said he and Pikulski still would have to spend most of their time locating fish big enough to win.

“Catching fish is easy. If the fish are there, I can always catch them,” Gilbert said. “It’s finding them that can be difficult. You have to look at each body of water and figure out where the biggest fish will be at that time.

“The first thing to do is see where other people have been fishing. That’s usually where the fish are. But they’re not always the fish you want, and don’t stay there long if you don’t catch fish. At Boom Lake, people were fishing around (underwater) cribs, because that’s where they caught bluegills and crappies last fall. But when we put an underwater TV camera down, all we could see were the cribs.

“I’m not fishing for cribs. I’m fishing for bluegills and crappies. So we left everyone else and moved out and found the fish in 24 feet of water. The cribs were in 20 feet. What you have to do is break the lake down to manageable portions. Even if you look on a place and don’t find fish, it tells you something. It tells you not to waste your time on other parts of the lake that are like that one.”

Teams entered in NAIFC events fish for designated species, usually bluegills, sunfish, crappies and perch, with a designated limit for each species each day. At Boom Lake it was eight fish of each species.

Anglers can use a portable ice shanty but are limited to one rod at a time. There are severe penalties for being over the limit.

Teams that have too many fish see their biggest fish removed from the pile and the weight of those fish subtracted from the total weight of their remaining fish.

“We caught all the bluegill we needed in an hour, but in that lake, an 8-incher was a big bluegill. Our biggest was 4 1/2 . What you needed to do was find big crappie, fish that went around a pound,” Gilbert said.

He said he and Pikulski usually stayed at each hole for about a minute, just long enough to either catch any active fish or decide that the hole wasn’t worth fishing.

“We used the TV camera some, but mostly to see what kind of area you’re fishing rather than looking for fish. We use a graph to locate the fish, but a TV camera is handy because if you can see that it looks like a place you didn’t catch fish in before, you can stop wasting time,” he said. “The camera can also show you if the fish are hanging out on the edges of the weeds or in the middle, or if they’re scattered around in open water.

“In deeper water, 30-35 feet, the cone of the (graph) transducer is so wide that you’ll see any fish under you. Sometimes in deep water we won’t even drop a bait in the hole if we don’t see what we want on the graph. We’re electronic fishermen. But in shallow water, the cone is so narrow we usually fish every hole. But if I don’t see a fish looking at the bait in 30 seconds or so, we move.”

Gilbert’s favorite lure for bluegills is an orange jig with a waxworm that he hooks at one end before popping the body to produce what he calls a gummy worm.

For crappies he likes the same jig with a minnow.

“I like it when the fish are spread out over a big area, a half mile or so. That way, a guy sitting on one hole can’t get lucky and take the lion’s share,” he said.