This ice fishing season a buddy and I decided to team up for the Eagle Claw / Shappell ice fishing tournament in Lake George, Colorado. Put on by the Eleven Mile Marina at the Eleven Mile Reservoir there were 160 teams in total able to sign up, each consisting of two people. This was my first competitive fishing tournament ever, and boy did I learn some lessons. We decided to enter both the January and February tournament. The tourney itself has different rules for each of the three dates changing things up and adding some challenging elements.
Timing
For us, we knew it was going to be a fairly long day. We live in Parker, and the tournament check-in was in Lake George. On a good day when we leave early, this is something like a just over two hour drive for us. We’ve done it a handful of times and still feel the juice is worth the squeeze for a few hours out on the ice. Both of us have young kids and wives at home that would prefer we not be out there until midnight. So for us, the wakeup call started at 1am on tournament day.
Having the truck gassed up and packed the night before ensures that the morning runs as smoothly as possible. Prep snacks and coffee ahead of time so you can just layer up and get rolling. Snacks are key since check in starts at 4 or 4:30 at the marina — so the amount of stores open to include gas stations is minimal.
Equipment
I don’t think either of us brought anything different than we would if we were just fishing. Rules prohibited alcohol for the tournament itself, so there was no beer in the cooler. But that meant more room for snacks! If we were going to be doing this more regularly a tournament bag might have been helpful. The marina had us all put our catches into identical trash bags for weigh in anyway. I’ll post an ice fishing equipment list here and link it in the near future.
One thing that was handy the second tournament we went out for was a loop style stringer. The old school chain stringer would do as there’s metal safety pin like enclosures that ensure each fish is on it’s own loop. We used a hole inside the tent to keep the fish alive, anchoring the stringer to a tent stake so as to not lose them. This way you can cull your tournament fish if you’re getting into the action. During an open water tournament you’d have tournament tags and you’d mark the fish in your live well.
Usually highly optional for fishing in my opinion are electronics. But having my Humminbird Helix 7 really helped when hole hopping. The upgraded battery from last outing made sure that it lasted all day. Our technique was to drill holes, mark depth, try to mark fish. If we weren’t seeing anything or getting bites, continue to prospect until we found a little hole that hungry fish were piled into.
Bait and Tackle
This being my first foray into ice fishing tournaments I think the big takeaway for bait is to have a variety. You won’t know what the hot bait is ahead of time. Other than perhaps reading the fishing reports and praying they’re still hungry for whatever they were biting on beforehand.
We came armed with nightcrawlers, mealworms, and wax worms as well as a host of synthetic bait. We had tube jigs of different sizes and colors knowing that they often prefer offerings in pink, white, and chartreuse.
Know the Rules
Study the rules as best as you can, and change your plan according to them. I can’t stress this enough at least for the tournament at Eleven Mile Reservoir. Their March Madness tournament has prize money for the first fish to the weigh in over time, so setting up close to the marina is key as you run to get your fish checked in. The first tournament date in January has the rule set that you can target three species of fish, trout, pike, and kokanee salmon and your best combination of fish wins. There are different limits for different species, so it’s worth paying attention to that.
Targeting multiple species of fish can be tricky for the second tournament, so specialists end up emerging. The most likely to put you in the money and also the most finnicky bite is the kokanee. If you can figure out how to dial in that bite on tournament day you have a real good shot at money.
There’s also some banned bait to be cognizant of. In the case of the tournament we were banned from using egg sacks that utilized real eggs. Trout and Kokanee will feed on egg sacks, and using eggs from wild salmonids was considered an unfair advantage. Colorado also has a ban on live minnows above a 7000 ft in elevation to be mindful of.
Moving
The reservoir we were on was fairly large, so moving was always an option. However, with it being pretty cold early on for the first tournament date, we set our tent down early. You want to maximize your time fishing. In the grand scheme of things setting a tent up and tearing it down doesn’t take much time. But all time counts when you’re on the clock. Another option would have been for us to split up during the course of the competition. We limited ourselves to one truck. We could have easily taken two — and fished different locations and then met back up before weigh in.
Moving takes time, but not moving might mean giving in to sunk cost fallacy. As in, I’ve been here fishing, I know it’s a good spot, I’m not moving. For us — and many other people in the same area we were fishing, it meant that we weren’t hooking into fish for hours of the tournament. We probably should have moved earlier.
What we did do that was very helpful was prospecting. At some point I got restless, and my gas powered auger was working well that day. Since it was behaving, I paced off ten paces from a hole I’d drilled previously, and began gridding the ice with holes. An 8″ auger would have probably been faster, but I’ve got a nice used 10″ that we bought at the end of our first season. Gridding the area, or prospecting allowed us to use our fish finders to hole hop while maintaining a base with our tent. We then found our sweet spots where we were marking fish and began catching some chunky trout!
Weigh In
Getting to weigh in was a bit of a challenge. I think in our minds we went as far as possible away from the marina to fish, knowing we could only work our way back over the day. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t move. So us, and all of our pals around the cove, packed up at the same time leading to the dirt roads being packed with pickups skittering over glare ice back to the Marina.
Weigh in was a time for gossip, sharing tips, and who caught what. Nobody was particularly cagey about what was caught, where, and on what bait. During the first tournament I even got some pointers on catching perch, which were not an official target nor were they scored. However they’re everyone’s favorite bycatch in the reservoir.
Have Fun
The second outing on our tournament adventure — the February offering of the Eagle Claw / Shappell Ice Fishing Classic the weather was more cooperative, and so were the fish. Less than an hour into the tournament time I had 8 fish iced including three perch, a fish that had been eluding me since I moved to Colorado. Then we absolutely slayed stocker trout.
Mindful that the marina staff didn’t want to count stockers unless they were padding the weight of the other catch — we tried targeting larger fish. Yet the stocker rainbows and small browns persisted. As weigh in time came and went, we decided it was a better day on the ice to skip weigh in and keep slaying the fish. This lead to our single best day on the ice yet. We iced about 40 fish from 7:00 to 3:00. While we decided the second outing to bounce from the tournament we learned that you don’t have to compete to win.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fun you want to have while ice fishing when you’re trying to be competitive. Sometimes the fishing is just too good to stop, even if the prize is one of Larry’s coveted green ice master jackets!
