Back in 2010 we did some ice fishing on my fathers pond. It was the first time I had ice fished. We hardly had the equipment to do it correctly. I remember cutting a hole in the ice with a chainsaw and extracting the big frozen square hunk of ice out of the hole to allow us entry to fish... The ice was snow covered and every bit of 14" thick so I would imagine that visibility for the fish beneath the thick, snowy ice was very low. We absolutely knocked them out that day though.. Every time we dropped a line and jigged it within minutes we would pull up another fish. Mostly all bluegill. We used a small jig tipped with a maggot and fished until we were blue in the face and could not take the cold any longer. We had very good results.


Flash forward to the next 4 or 5 years that I bought my place and had a very similar sized pond pushed out. Similar depth, similar in many ways.. Dissimilar in that every year I've had the pond stocked (stocked in 2016) and tried ice fishing, I've come up very empty handed. Only on rare occasion do I get a fish. I've probably bagged under 10 fish in the 4 or 5 winters that I've attempted to ice fish that pond. The fish I catch are always hours apart from each other. I've spent many hours punching holes in various places thinking I did not have the right spot. My pond has bluegill, HSB, LMB, YP. What gives? I've tried on clear ice with no snow cover and everything in between. I now have proper equipment including an auger, scooper, and a few ice fishing rods with jigs. What types of techniques could I potentially try or why do you think I am not able to replicate similar results from the past?