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Step 1
Bring your bait bucket into the bait shop and tell the attendant how many dozen shiners you want. Make sure that you buy enough. Nobody wants to pack it in early because they have run out of shiners. Better to buy too many then too few. A good rule of thumb is to buy one dozen shiners for everyone that is fishing, and another dozen after that. For example, if there are three of you going out, purchase four dozen shiners.
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Step 2
The size of your shiners should depend on what type of fish you targeting. Small shiners will catch trout and panfish, medium are good for pickerel, walleye and bass, while the big shiners will be a good bait for northern pike. The price of the shiners goes up with the size.
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Step 3
Once you have drilled a hole and have your tip-up ready grab a shiner from your bait bucket. Use a small mesh sieve net or your hands. The net works better on a very cold and windy day as it keeps your hands much drier, reducing the exposure of wet skin to biting winds. If the temperatures are a bit more “balmy,” say above freezing, catch the shiner from the bucket using your hands.
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Step 4
Hold the shiner steady and proceed to put the sharp point of the hook through its mouth. A shiner does not have a large mouth, so take care when doing this. Push the hook into the mouth and up through the shiner’s nose so that it is pointing upwards. Shiners hooked through the mouth tend to swim in a downwards motion and live longer than those hooked through the back. However, the chance of them getting off the hook and swimming away is greater.
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Step 5
Hook it through the back if you want a shiner to have less chance of escaping. You must be careful though not to hook the shiner in the spine. Handle the shiner gently, holding it with the tail extending away from your hand. Take the point of the hook and push it into the shiner halfway between its tail and the end of its dorsal, fin. The hook should go into the shiner a bit below the end of its dorsal fin and slightly towards the tail. You should be able to easily push the hook in and have the end come out cleanly. Shiners hooked in this manner will tend to swim upwards.
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Step 6
Use a split shot or two to keep the shiners down in the water and away from the top of the hole. The added weight makes it hard for the shiner to come up, keeping it where fish can easily see and attack it. If a shiner has been grabbed by a fish but you fail to hook the fish, take it out of the water and look it over. If it has been chewed up pretty badly then discard it on the ice. Seagulls often hover around where people ice fish. They will make short work of the injured or dead shiner. Replace your shiner with a fresh one.
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Step 7
Keep your shiners in cold water. A sudden change in water temperature is fatal to a shiner. The water that the bait shop attendant puts them in should be fine during the day of fishing. If the water level of your bucket drops, or you have an accident and spill the bucket, use cold water from the lake or pond you are fishing to replenish it. Have some sort of can with you so you can dip it into a drilled hole in the ice and refill your bait bucket.
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Step 8
Try to keep the shiner out of the cold wind and off the ice surface when you are moving tip-ups that have shiners on them. Ice fishermen often relocate their tip-ups from one hole to another. The shiner will survive the trip across the ice to a new hole as long as it doesn’t freeze! Shield it with your gloved hand or keep it dangling above the ice. The shiner will look dead when you first put the tip-up into its new hole, but they will make a quick recovery and start swimming again.
