Antero Ice Fishing - Jan 19, 2011

I'm pretty sure I can't hotspot ice fishing at Antero - so I will actually mention the name of the stillwater I fished this time.

Darren and I decided to try our hand at ice fishing. We left D's house around 5am and headed for Antero. The ride was pretty uneventful for me, but Darren got pretty excited about breakfast pizza at the store in Fairplay, so we had to stop. After waiting 10 minutes for the pizza we left and were at Antero a little after 7am.

The weather really wasn't that bad, some slight wind, but it wasn't that cold - maybe 30 degrees. We (over) dressed, grabbed the sled, loaded it up and started hiking out onto the water from just east of the North Boat Ramp. We walked out a couple hundred yards and started drilling holes. My new ice auger worked surprisingly well - slicing through the ice like butter. The ice was approximately 12 inches thick and was about 60 percent covered by a small layer of snow.



We set up shop and got our gear in the water and were treated to a nice sunrise.



We rigged two rods each - one with flies and the other with mealworms. Since we were both ice fishing rookies, we wanted to try as many things as possible. Darren actaully tipped some tube jigs with the wax worms and I tipped a pigsticker hook with mealworms. Something was bound to work. And it did - within a few minutes Darren had a couple hits, both times yanking the hooks out of the fishes mouths.



It wasn't long before Darren was hooked up again, dropping his flies down the hole after switching to an all mealworm rig he had a fish slam his flies and it was fish on. About 1 second later his other rod, only a couple of feet away, went under as well - he had a double! He quickly landed the first fish - a nice 16 inch rainbow, and then I handed him his second rod - and he landed a sweet dark colored 18 inch cuttbow that had a sweet gash under it's throat.





I'd love to tell you that we were hooking fish all day, but we really weren't. We literally went an hour between fish. I did manage to hook a fish around 11 or so - a dink 15 inch rainbow. I caught it on my daughters pink Rainbow Shakespeare rod - and I'm proud of it.



This is a pic of Darren enjoying one of my nice cold beers - I only had 6, we split them and they were gone by 11am. Note to self, bring more beer.



Darren and I traded fish the rest of the day - but again, one every hour. I landed a fish around 1:30 - a 16 inch dink rainbow again, then at about 2:30 I had another slightly larger rainbow right up to the hole but he popped off before I could get him on the ice. Darren hooked a nice rainbow as well.

You can see the bad weather creeping in from the west, it looked like that all day. Then eventually it hit us, but only for about an hour or so, then it blew over.





We decided to pack up our gear and head home around 3pm. After a stop at Subway, and some bad weather starting at Conifer, we were home by about 5:45. The weather was actually nice and dry all the way until Conifer, then it all of a sudden got really ugly - white out conditions and blowing snow. Kind of a crappy ride home.

Thanks again for going with me today D - it was a good time and a great learning experience.