Ice Fishing Bluegill & Crappie Depths

Series Summary

The word for fishing refers to the act of hunting for fish, shellfish, squid, octopus, and other edible marine invertebrates. The most common type of fishing is a worldwide sport and hobby that requires equipment such as fishing poles, line, lures and bait. Fishing originated over 10,000 years ago among hunter-gatherer societies. Today, fishing is still a primary means of achieving food, but it is also a trophy sport. Saltwater fishing differs significantly from ice fishing in the equipment and complexity.

In this free video series a professional hunting guide, Bradley Carlton, will show you all there is to know about fishing for panfish. Bradley will begin by explaining the depths at which you should fish in order to catch bluegill and crappie fish. You'll then learn several tips for baiting, jigging and dipping in order to catch a variety of panfish. You'll learn to catch perch, smelt as well as how you should set your rod for the best results. In the end Bradley will teach you so many techniques for catching panfish that you'll only question will be how to prepare them for dinner.

Video Transcript

"Hey let's not leave out bluegill and crappie. Both excellent eating pan fish. Members of the sunfish family, bluegill and crappie tend to be a little bit smaller and kind of more oval than your salmonids like a smelt. They can get quite large, up to 12 and even 14 inches, but typically the bluegill and crappie you're going to see are anywhere in the 6 to 10 inch range. This is a blue gill and crappie set up with a slab set on a chained hailey, attached to a swivel with a tinker split shot on it. Now we want to find the right depth for bluegill and crappie. These are going to be the more shallow fish. You're going to be fishing bluegill and crappie, typically, in about six to ten feet of water. So right off the bottom you're going to be fishing in shallow, and if you remember on the topo map where we scouted this for safety purposes we're in about 8 feet of water. So we're in a good bluegill crappie scenario. You also want to have a lot of vegetation on the bottom and a lot of submerged debris where it provides them with some sort of structure around which for protection, habitat and food. You want to jig for them similar to perch and smelt, but you're jigging around a submerged area where there's some kind of structure that they can hide in. Again, in about six to eight feet of water."