Weather: very cold and clear
Moon Phase: 46% Moon
Location: Pineview Reservoir
Ice Thickness: 8 inches
Bait: small minnow on a trebble hook below a split shot sinker
Who Went: Rick, Me
Rick and I fished Pineview Thursday after work for some late night Crappie fishing, and late is exactly what it ended up being. I knew I had to work the next day, but we still didn't get home til 3:00 a.m. Needless to say it was a rough day at work on Friday. We hiked out to a spot off Browning point near the island where we found 30 feet of water, it looked like a decent spot, so we started fishing. Our fish finders didn't show any fish for about an hour and we were not getting any bites, so we toughed the cold weather and made a move. We went out to deeper water in about 46 feet and found suspended Crappie showing up all over the fish finder. This got us pretty excited and we hurried to get the tent up and the heater going so we could start fishing. This is the first time since I have started ice fishing that I can honestly say I continuosly saw fish showing up on the fish finder for 4 hours straight and the fishing still wasn't good! We caught a few fish here and there, but for as many as we were seeing I thought it would be a lot better. Rick got us started with this nice Crappie that finally got us off the skunk list!
It seemed like as the night went on the fish started giving in and biting more often, and I finally landed my first Crappie of the night.
The fishing stayed somewhat consistent from the hours of 8 p.m. to midnight with us both landing around a couple an hour, but as soon as the clock hit 12:00 p.m. the fishing completely shut down. I would say we probably caught around a dozen total for the night. Rick took a few home for dinner.
Biggest Crappie of the night was 13 inches. It was fun fishing at night, but I think next time I will do it when I don't have to wake up at 7:00 a.m. and work all day!
It seemed like as the night went on the fish started giving in and biting more often, and I finally landed my first Crappie of the night.The fishing stayed somewhat consistent from the hours of 8 p.m. to midnight with us both landing around a couple an hour, but as soon as the clock hit 12:00 p.m. the fishing completely shut down. I would say we probably caught around a dozen total for the night. Rick took a few home for dinner. Biggest Crappie of the night was 13 inches. It was fun fishing at night, but I think next time I will do it when I don't have to wake up at 7:00 a.m. and work all day! 
Thoughts of a great day started to enter my mind! I dropped my jig down again, but this time I sat there for an hour with no bites. To make matters worse, none of the other 7 guys I was fishing with had any bites either! We decided to go on a fish hunt and hiked close to another half mile out to the island to see if the unchartered territory might bring more success. I managed to catch two more fish out of the area but that was it! We moved again with the same result, only this time I landed one fish. The rest of the group was still skunked! Two guys I was with decided to give Strawberry the birdie finger and left early, while the rest of us made the trek of a lifetime across the entire bay over to a little cove we felt might hold fish. When we got there I quickly hooked up with a fish and the others started to get angry with my success. Soon after though,
JJ landed this cutthroat that had no color at all! I think it could have been an albino. I took a close up picture to show how the fish literally had no color pigment at all!
The somewhat faster fishing didn't last very long and soon enough the boredom got to us. We decided to have an Ice Auger Championship, "man vs. machine". Hunt is probably the fastest I have ever seen at drilling a hole through the ice with a hand auger, so we put him to the test. This is the results of round one...
We also ran into some sketchy areas in the middle of the bay that looked to be open water and some very thin ice. It was like a mine field and we had to be very careful all the way back to our vehicles.
One of my ice fishing goals this year is to land a walleye through the ice. I made my first attempt tonight at Utah Lake. I arrived to the warm springs near the "L" at Lincoln Beach around 4:30 p.m. There was absolutely no one around and it felt like I had the whole lake to myself.
First thing I did was walk onto the ice and drilled a hole to check for strength. Ice was a solid 4 inches so I was good to go! Gathered my gear and walked out to an area that looked walleyeish. I drilled about 12 holes in all different depths and locations. Next thing I did was go back to the shore and sit there for 45 minutes. Sounds crazy I know, but I have heard that this is the secret to walleye fishing at Utah Lake. The lake is very shallow and walleye are so timid that you have to be very quiet, so you don't spook them off. You can't be trudging all over the ice drilling holes in 5 feet of water right above their heads! Once my 45 minutes was up I tippy toed as quiet as I could out onto the ice and began fishing each and every hole. I saw a fair amount of fish on my fish finder that came up to my offering, only to move on without a bite. I stuck it out well into dark but it wasn't to be, so the walleye go up 1-0 in the series this year. 
I know it's a little early for ice fishing, but the itch started early this year, and I heard that Scofield was already frozen with the recent cold snap we've had. With that said, we made the trip to one of the coldest places on earth! When we got there I was shocked that my truck said it was a cozy 9 degrees. I was expecting temps in the negatives. I stepped out of the truck and soon realized that with the wind, my expectations were met. It couldn't have been over -10 with the windchill factor! Half the lake was still open water so we were careful as we walked out onto the ice and checked it for strength. It was solid as a rock so we made our way out to a spot that looked good. We set up shop and we were all glad that JJ brought his new ice fishing shack that is about the size of a house. It fits three guys very comfortably and I am amazed how far the ice shack engineers have come in building these things. It went up in under 5 minutes. As soon as we started fishing we began getting hits and seeing fish all over the fish finder. We had a hard time hooking anything for the first half hour until Dave hooked up and we found out why. We were sitting right in the middle of Chub City! We started landing little chubs left and right! We started getting some trout in the mix as well, so we just stayed put since the weather didn't really give us the urge to move. The trout were all small and we caught cutthroats, rainbows and Dave landed one Tiger Trout. 
Once the weather calmed down a bit we decided to venture to some new holes. I think we should have done this a few hours earlier but oh well. We didn't catch as many fish, but the ones we did catch were trout. JJ was having a tough day so he decided he was gonna start fishing out of Daves hole .
We ended the day with a total of approximately 40 chubs and 36 trout. Trout totals were me at 18, Dave at 14, and JJ with 4. The ice fishing has officially started and with the cold weather sticking around the other lakes are probably close already! As we walked off the ice I took some photos of the open water out in the distance. If you look close in these last two pictures you can see it just past the guy in the orange pumpkin suit.
The picture above is what it looked like at Strawberry Reservoir when we showed up on Friday. It was about 20 feet of visibility at the most. Lucky for us I have a gps and we were able to navigate the lake just fine by following the gps maps on my lowrance fish finder. This picture shows how important the gps was for going through tight terrain with no visibility. The red lines indicate our traveling path. We had nothing to go off other than electronics! Crazy!
After Renegade we went on a journey fishing every corner of the lake. We never found anywhere that was extremely fast fishing, but we seemed to catch a few at every stop. We went a little ways into the narrows and in one spot had to trudge through some thin ice. I was a little nervous about scratching my boat, but it ended up being fine. The narrows were gorgeous as usual, but the fishing was slow. I have never seen the lake this calm and it lasted all day long!
In one little bay near the marina I landed this nice fish that went just under 5 pounds.
We ended the evening fishing the last hour of daylight in the back of East Portal Bay near the marina. The fishing picked up and made for an exciting finish with me and Phil fighting for the crown of most fish caught in a day. Phil went on a three fish run and tied it up making it very interesting, but then I caught two insurance fish right before dark to seal the deal. I ended up with 18 fish on the day and Phil at 16. Troy didn't keep track but he was probably close to both Phil and I. It was a great way to put the boat into hibernation for the winter with one last successful trip. Now it's on to ice fishing...
As I was letting him go, Phil had a fish follow his spinner down the river and then the fish just stopped and stared at it when Phil couldn't reel in anymore. So Phil dragged the spinner up stream for about a foot and the fish took it. We thought it must be the dumbest fish in the river and we got a pretty good laugh over it.
We hiked in about a mile and a half and then worked our way back to the dam hitting every promising looking hole on the way upstream. It was a fun way to fish as we all had polarized glasses and we were basically sight fishing. See a fish and cast to it trying to entice a bite. We were using glow bugs, which look like a big orange fish egg, as we were expecting the browns to be spawning. We seemed to have just missed the spawn, but the glow bugs were still working well. The first fish I tried to cast to made for quite the experience. I snagged about twelve bushes, tangled my line about ten times, and couldn't get the fly anywhere near the fish. After this first blunder of trying to get the fly fishing down, I felt I picked it up fairly quickly and didn't have many other problems, but that first attempt took a lot of patience from Rick and I think he thought he was in for a long day! Two other guys came with us and they were both fly fisherman as well. Kobe works with Rick and then Kobe's cousin Sheldon tagged along as well. Rick is a really good fly fisherman and landed the first fish we saw on the river. We soon found a hole that was stacked with fish and had some nice ones in the mix. We all started landing fish from this hole and this is where I caught my biggest of the day.
Rick also caught fish out of this hole, including a new addition to the Price River, the Tiger Trout.
Sheldon got in the mix with a nice cutthroat...
Then Kobe landed this nice brown... 
I continued to catch fish all the way up to the dam and had a great time. I made Rick take some actions shots of me fly fishing cause I told him my other fishing buddies would never believe I actually went lint throwing!
Rick took big fish honor for the day with this fat brown... 
I almost hit for the cycle on the river as I caught browns, cutthroats and a tiger trout. All I needed was a rainbow, but it wasn't to be. I had a lot of fun fly fishing and I could see me doing it once in awhile just to get out and walk the rivers. I don't spend enough time on the rivers now that I have my boat.
We also ended up fishing at Chicken Creek East, and the back of East Portal Bay without much success. The weird thing was we actually got a decent amount of hits throughout the day but just didn't land many. I was the worst missing hit after hit, but Phil also missed quite a few and Zenger some as well! With about an hour left of daylight, Phil had a slight lead on the fish count and Zenger was right behind him. I was in last place with 1 fish and about 30 missed hook sets! It was frustrating to say the least!
The wind was still whipping so we decided to hide behind the mountain over at Haws Point and try our luck there until dark. It ended up being a good choice. The wind finally died down and we started catching some fish. Unfortunately we only had about half an hour to do it until dark.
Phil and Zenger continued to battle for supremacy while I stayed at the bottom.
The final tally was 9 fish for the winner Phil, 8 fish for Zenger and 4 for me. The weirdest part of the trip was that we never found any areas where we continually saw fish on the finder. Even when we started catching them at the end, they were not showing up on the finder. We just couldn't find any good concentrations of fish! We had a blast though and want to get back up there before winter sets in, so I'm sure we will!