You can do everything else right and never slide a fish up onto the ice if you don’t know how to fight. You can be sitting over the top of a pack of ravenous fish, and hook a bunch of them, and still come home empty-handed.

Let’s maximize your hooked-to-landed ratio, by going over the keys to fighting a fish that you hook through the ice.

You need the right rod

I’ve often talked about the importance of today’s state-of-the-art rods when it comes to presenting lures, but let’s consider them from the perspective of hooking and landing fish. You have to have a good rod to fight fish with, and you won’t find it in those buggy whip-style noodle rods. Each rod should have the proper flexibility for the line you’re using. It needs to be flexible enough in the tip to keep the line from breaking, but with enough backbone to keep the fish coming to you.

You can learn to recognize a good rod when you feel it. Hold onto the tip with one hand and the handle with your other hand, and test how flexible the tip is. Compare how easily it flexes with how much pressure it takes to snap the line you would use it with, and common sense will tell you whether any given rod’s tip will help cushion the force applied to the line while fighting a fish. For panfish rods, you might use 2-pound-test, on up to maybe as heavy as 20-pound-test for larger fish. (The rod has to also be good for jigging the lures you will use it with, so it starts to make sense that you need a relatively lighter tip on a 2-pound-test rod than you do on a 10-pound-test rod.)

After checking the tip, flex the whole rod with more force to see how stiff it is. Pay attention to whether the entire rod flexes in sort of a uniform mushy curve (which I don’t like), or develops good strong backbone as it gets closer to the handle. You want a rod with enough power to tame the fish you hook.

Getting a good hookset

When you set the hook, it’s a mistake if the rod ends up above your head.

If that happens, now you’re trying to wind fast enough to get the rod back down in front of you, and in the meantime, the fish is in control. You have to keep the whole works out in front of you at all times.

No matter how cool it looks on TV, don’t use your shoulders and arms to set the hook. It’s a wrist thing. It’s a snap of the wrist thing, in fact.

With the right rod, a rod that has a flexible tip but good backbone, you can set the hook with a very short movement. I want to stress something very strongly at this point: a long movement, that uses your arms and shoulders, is extremely slow, and gives the fish time to spit out the hook in a lot of cases. You might think you’re being very decisive, very aggressive, if you really pump the rod upward until it hits the roof of your Fish Trap, but you aren’t. You’re actually giving the fish more time to react.

A quick flip of the wrist will bring into play the power of the rod, and will drive the hook home. Even with a lightweight panfish rod, if the blank has the right power curve, you can literally turn a fish over on its side with an upward turn of your wrist.

When you get the hook home, the fight begins.

Fight ‘em right

The most common mistake after the fight begins is letting the rod come to rest, which creates slack in the line. As long as the rod is bent it’s loaded, and the fish is under your control (assuming it isn’t wrapping you up in weeds or something). If the flex comes out of the rod, the fish can get slack line, and if you didn’t get a good hookset, it’s easy for the fish to come unbuttoned. Remember, the rod should have a flexible tip, which will help cushion the shock if the fish makes a sudden run, which will help the line not break. Your reel should either have a good drag system, or a way for you to backreel and give line when the fish pulls hard enough that the line would break.

Don’t get into the habit of pumping the rod upward and then dropping it down to reel up the slack line. You can pump upward as long as you keep continuous tension on the rod. If you drop the rod quickly and create slack, you’re begging for the fish to get off.

Also, be patient. Enjoy the fight. Too many anglers seem to be in a hurry to land the fish and get back to fishing. You’ve spent enough time waiting for the bite. If you take your time and fight the fish with the help of your equipment, you’ll have more fun and land more. Horsing a fish can cause any number of bad things to happen, including having the hook come out from too much pressure (sometimes the hook is barely nipped into the edge of their mouth), or having the line break from a sudden shock exceeding the breaking strength.

(By the way, dull hooks are another major cause of losing fish. Carry a fine file and touch up even your tiny little panfish jigs, and you’ll get deeper hooksets, and land more fish.)

Be patient when the fish gets to the hole

Keep the rod bent, and keep everything under control, and eventually the fish will be coming up close to the hole. Now we have to get the fish’s head started up the hole.

It’s again at this point when a lot of anglers get impatient, and start to break every rule of fighting fish. I see guys reach down into the hole and grab the fish too soon, or even drop their rods and try to grab the fish. I also see people grab their line and try to lift the fish by the line, which causes many breakoffs and also makes it easy for the fish to shake the hook loose.

A fish may not be smart, but it knows it doesn’t want to go up the hole. If the fish’s nose gets past the outside edge of the hole, let it swim by and turn it for another try. If you try to force the fish up the hole from a bad angle, that’s often the cause of the hook catching on the bottom of the ice.

Also, be ready for a surge of strength once they get into the hole. They struggle hard, even if they seem whipped. Remain calm, and try to get their head started up the hole. Keep this in mind: once they start coming up the hole, they can’t turn around and swim down, unless they are quite a bit smaller than the hole.

Once the fish’s head is at the top of the ice, you can reach down and grab them or gaff them, or just slide them onto the ice if they are small enough. But at no time should you allow the flex to come out of the rod until the fight is won. A couple years ago, Mark Strand caught a 2-pound, 8-ounce bluegill in Nebraska, and his story of the fight is enough to make you a believer.

Once the fish started up the 7-inch hole, it stuck good. The head was all the way out of the water, but this beautiful trophy was far from landed. It was a Mexican standoff for a while, but Mark held his ground, kept the rod bent and the line tight, and soon enough the fish tried to jump, and it propelled itself neatly out of the hole and flopped on the ice in his Fish Trap. Had Mark tried to grab the line it no doubt would have broke. Had he let up on the rod, the fish could have slid back down the hole. The power of a good rod brought the battle to a successful conclusion.

It can do the same thing for you.