In the first part of this series, we began a conversation with professional ice fisherman Dave Genz on learning to find your own fish. Ice anglers everywhere are famous for being timid in this department, choosing to join the crowd on the ice, rather than seek out their own spots.

We aim to change all that this winter.

In this article, Dave continues to spill the beans on how to choose potentially good ice fishing water, and find fish.

Q: Dave, thanks again for taking time to share your secrets. Let’s start by digging into a concept you talk about with your associates on the Winter Fishing Systems team, of paying close attention to high-water cycles.

What’s so important about high water?

Genz: Well… where do I start? You know, a lot of people aren’t going to live in an area where they have the luxury of choosing from a lot of lakes. But a lot of lakes go through low and high water cycles. A lot of lakes don’t have a river running through them. Sometimes, you have several lakes hooked together without a good outlet system, so they take runoff from surrounding area because they’re a low spot.

Devils Lake in North Dakota is a great example. It has an inlet but no outlet. If that area doesn’t get a lot of rain, water doesn’t run in, but it continues to evaporate, and the water levels drop.

These kinds of lakes have high and low water cycles. On rainy years, the water goes up. And especially if there is a gentle slope to a surrounding countryside of marsh or field, you have the ideal conditions for small fish to swim up into that shallow flooded zone and grow up all summer. That’s why, in the years following a high-water cycle, you tend to see great fishing. The fish get bigger faster, more fish get big than normal, and it makes for a great situation.

Q: But what about lakes that freeze out? Can they come back during a period of high water?

Genz: Actually, before we get too far, let me explain what freeze-out is, for anybody who hasn’t experienced it. It doesn’t mean the ice freezes all the way from top to bottom: it means the lake gets low in oxygen during heavy snow years. When snow cover is sufficient to limit sunlight penetration, you don’t have photosynthesis occurring. Everything ‘dies’ under the ice. Weeds die and consume oxygen, and without sunlight, oxygen isn’t replenished in the system. Eventually, fish die off, too, because there isn’t enough oxygen to sustain them.

But to answer the question, yes, lakes that freeze out can come back during a high-water cycle. It can happen faster than you think, if the freeze-out lake is connected to a lake that doesn’t freeze out. The high water provides a pathway for fish to swim from the lake that didn’t freeze out into the lake that did freeze out, and they find little competition for the available food. Food comes back quick: bugs, minnows, plankton. There’s plenty to eat in a lake that ‘froze out,’ if there are fish there to eat it. The fishing can come back within a year or two.

We don’t know for sure how fish know to escape dropping water levels, and seek rising water levels, but they think it has to do with a built-in instinct for survival. Any ways, fish do find their way into these waters on rising levels.

The bottom line is I pay attention to high-water cycles, and fish lakes that are in the high-water cycle. As the water drops, the bigger fish get caught, and the remaining fish don’t grow as quickly. You end up with a lot of small fish, so you don’t go there as often.

Q: Isn’t that assuming the fish get kept? What if more people practiced catch-and-release?

Genz: No doubt it would help tremendously. Yeah, we see the fish going home in people’s buckets. It’s not us that thins it out, I assure you. Yes, if more people let more fish go good fishing would last much longer. And it’s never easier to release fish successfully than in winter. Cold water holds more oxygen, and fish just survive better than they do when they get stressed out in warm water.

Q: What about manmade reservoirs? And farm ponds? Do these same theories hold for them, too?

Genz: Yes. Not only during periods of high water, but new ponds and new reservoirs- that is, when they are first filled- will hold bigger fish. There’s more cover, and the water is more fertile than it will be later on. It’s true for bog reservoirs and small ponds. In cattle country, they call them stock dams; in farm country, they call them farm ponds. They’re the same thing.

Q: You also have some definite ideas on how to choose a lake based on time of year. Summarize your feelings on what type of lake to fish at the early, mid, and late portions of the ice season.

Genz: I like to fish smaller lakes, including ponds, early in the winter. Fish the deepest part of the lake, or any narrows in the lake. After snow covers the lake, and it gets later into the winter, a lack of oxygen can catch up with these smaller waters, and the fish become tough to catch. They just don’t feed much; they’re in survival mode.

In the middle part of the season, I like to fish mid-sized waters. Now is the time to seek out green weeds, if you can find them. This is where the oxygen is still good. There are so many green weeds at first ice, that the fish tend to be more scattered. But when you narrow down the green weeds, later in the year, more fish are concentrated in them.

(Or, as he pointed out in the first part of this series, seek out dirty-water lakes that don’t have shallow weed growth in winter, and fish the deeper water along dropoffs.)

Even these mid-size lakes tend to become slow producers as the winter wears on. There can be actually dead areas in a lake, with massive areas of low oxygen. If a creek flows through a swamp area and then into a lake, and the creek keeps flowing even though the lake is iced over, it can actually make the low oxygen problem worse.

Here’s how it happens: The swamp is basically frozen solid from top to bottom, so the water that does seep out of it is dead, it lacks oxygen. This dead water keeps flowing into the lake, through the swamp, and pushing good water out of the lake through the outlet. You can only flow in with the bad and out with the good for so long before it contributes to the oxygen problem.

Q: So, in a lake that has an oxygen problem, is it true that you might locate fish, see them on your FL-8, but not be able to get them to bite?

Genz: Yes. We call them ‘sniffers,’ those fish that sit and look at your bait for a half-hour and never bite. We’ve learned not to waste our time trying to catch them. That’s why we fish larger lakes late in the season.

We’re talking about general rules here, but remember, every year is different. How much snow is piled on the ice? The more snow, the less light gets through the ice and down into the water. How many sunny days have we had? On some winters, we get long stretches of cloudy days. All that can bring on oxygen problems sooner, and worse, on some years.

Q: Something else we haven’t talked about is choosing a lake to fish based on what time of day you’ll be fishing. You have experienced that can guide us here, too…

Genz: Yeah, and I use this to my advantage. If I can only fish early and late in the day, or if I choose to, then I fish clear-water lakes. That’s because fish turn on in clear water at those times.

When the sun hits the trees, you get a flurry of activity in the clear water. But that’s the time fish quit biting, a lot of times, on the dirty-water lakes. If you can only fish during the bright part of the day, fish dirty water.

It’s tough to pack up and leave when you’re catching fish on a dirty-water lake at 2 in the afternoon, but I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve died on a lake like that in the evening. I’ve learned to leave and go fish a nearby clear water lake for the last couple hours of light, and right through sunset. It’s the wise thing to do.

There can be a good night bite on dirty-water lakes, though. I can’t explain that, but it happens.

Q: In some ways, you often sound anti-clear water. Why is that?

Genz: If you’re trying to catch fish on Saturday afternoon, which is what a lot of people want to do, your best choice is a dirty-water lake. I’m just saying that the fish in a clear-water environment are hard to catch in the middle of the day. It takes experience with subtle, horizontal presentations, and sight fishing, to catch much. You’re just making things tougher on yourself than you have to if you try to fight those odds.