Ice fishing can be somewhat of a challenge when it comes to what types of live bait to use for what species of fish you want to catch.
It takes a lot of patience and practice to Be able to determine what works and what doesn’t work. And every lake you fish is going to be different. So there is no perfect solution to this dilemma.
Try this, try that, fish deeper, bring your line up fish more shallow. Fish can be tricky creatures when they are swimming under that ice sheet on top of them. You see the fish metabolism slows down in the winter months’ kind of hibernation type of effect that keeps them alive and their body temperature regulated for the cold water.
Fish will tend to go after smaller live bait
in the winter because of this metabolism change. They can’t digest the bigger live baits that they usually can in summer.
Thus, they go after the smaller live baits. In this article, I will introduce you to a few different live ice fishing baits that can be used for a variety of fish you might be fishing for. These live baits need to stay wiggling and alive not frozen and dead otherwise the fish will not respond to bait. The keyword here is LIVE bait.
The exception is when fishing with minnows sometimes you want them to be dead. I will explain later.
