Ice fishing at Jackson Lake

“Here comes a school of fish,” my grandson and fishing partner, Brandon, hollered at me as he hooked one. As he iced the 16-incher, I also got its twin and noticed my second rod twitching. As I set the 3/8-ounce jig, tipped with sucker meat, it felt heavy and slowly the line on my reel started disappearing. For ten minutes, the fish and I battled with it winning as the hook came out on a barrel roll near the bottom.

The trip to Jackson Lake for a chance to wrestle with a large lake trout (mackinaw) was a promise I had made to Brandon a year ago when a trip was canceled due to Covid-19. The guy left out of this trip was my friend, Wayne Clayton, who passed away during the winter and we had many thoughts about him as the day progressed.

The morning fishing was by far the best near the Signal Mountain boat ramp that had been plowed open two weeks ago. We were an hour or two later than we wanted to be due to not finding any store open to get our day license. But the sun had taken the chill from the air as we easily walked onto the 2.3 feet of ice.

With an auger that had a 2.5-foot blade, we only had about two inches to spare when we drilled the holes. We finally found the preferred water depth from 35 to 45 feet and set up our two rods each with a third hole for our fish-finders. On Jackson Lake, each fisherman can ice fish with only two rods instead of five like it is in Idaho.

We were using “glow-in-the-dark” Fuzzy-Grubs tipped with minnows or sucker meat just like Wayne taught us several years ago. Individual fish were working along the bottom and hitting very light, causing us to miss them, but when our fish-finders showed four or five fish coming through, they were more aggressive. We had good luck hooking fish with the chartreuse or “Gold Strike” colored jigs while the blue ones produced by “dead-sticking” (not jigging them).

About every half hour, a small group of fish would visit us with one or both of us successfully landing a fish before they moved on. Most of the fish caught were from 14 to 17 inches long and were released, but we missed the majority of our hits.

The large school came in about 11:30 a.m. with very active fish. All of our rods were getting hits as I battled the hog on the bottom. We caught our last fish at 12:30 p.m. and only got two hits each from then until 3 p.m. when we headed home.

The heat from the blazing sun raised the temperature to 55 degrees and gifted each of us with a very nice sunburned face and neck. The ice was still very solid with only a quarter of an inch of slush on top. We also noticed that those fishermen who had been fishing a half-mile from us had left the ice about 1 p.m. We soon found out why they had left.

The sun had changed the solid crusted snow into two feet of slush. The 40 yards to the parking lot became a struggle as each step “post-holed” us to our hip, but it wasn’t too bad for me because Brandon broke the trail for the old man to follow. I guess that was his payment for me taking him fishing.

If you are considering ice fishing on Jackson Lake, I would suggest you call Signal Mountain Resort or Colter Bay Lodge for a report on ice conditions. Maverik in Jackson usually sells day licenses but did not have a worker who could sell them when we went last Saturday and it took us an hour before we found that the Hoback Market, 11 miles south of Jackson, sold them and opened at 6 a.m.

It was a wonderful day spent with a grandson with a lot of memories to add to the experience.