We sat down with him for a conversation on what it takes to select a good ice fishing lake, then locate its fish.

Q: Dave, first of all, thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with others looking to broaden their ice fishing horizons. To get started, what can you tell us about the big picture when it comes to choosing a lake to fish through the ice?

Genz: One really important thing to know, something that I look for all the time, is that it’s much easier to fish dirty-water lakes than clear-water lakes. You might say this is a secret, because most people do not know this.

There are varying degrees of dirtiness to the water. Some lakes are stained, which can look like dirty water, but lot of light penetration still gets through. Other lakes really are dirty, with very little penetration. A test I use is when you auger your hole and pull the auger out, if the water that comes up with the blade changes the color of the snow, I’d call that dirty-water lake. Those are the lakes I’m talking about.

In these types of lakes, the fish are going to be deep, because there’s no winter weeds to speak of. Weeds can be important to fish location, even in winter, on more clear-water lakes(editor: something we’ll talk about in about in a minute!). But when you’re dealing with a dirty-water lake, you can figure the fish, including the panfish, will be deep all winter long. You’ve eliminated the shallow water right away, and that makes finding fish a lot easier.

Q: We know it’s going to vary from species to species, but are there general rules of thumb regarding what type of spots tend to hold fish in these dirty-water lakes in winter?

Genz: Yes. What I look for are fairly breaks(dropoffs). But I don’t want to see a second echo on my fl-8 (the depthfinder he puts right in his hole while looking for fish, and fishing). If I’m getting a strong second echo that means I’m on a rock bottom. Generally, I don’t want rock, except sometimes for walleyes.

It’s a dropoff now, so you know it can’t be mud, because that would just wash away. But I don’t really want it to be rock; I look for a firm marl, a hard clay, the kind of stuff that sticks to your anchor in the summertime. These are the areas where hatches occur, and winter feed for fish tends to live in these areas.

Q: But what you see on a Fl-8 changes depending on how high you set up the gain, right? How can you be sure you’re on hard or soft bottom?

Genz: If you’re using an FL-8, and you’re on rock, the gain can be barely turned up from 0 and you get a second echo. But if you’re on mud, you can turn the gain up pretty high and still not get a second echo. I’m looking for an area of changing depths, where I can have the gain turned up a bit, say about 4 or 5 depending on the depth, but I still don’t get a second echo.

Q: So you don’t tend to fish at the bottom, on the basin flat, or on the top of a shallow flat? You tend to concentrate your fishing efforts along the break?

Genz: Yes. Most fish are better equipped to feed off a break than off a flat bottom. Fish tend to feed off vertical weed stalks and the slopes of breaks, because then they don’t have to tip over on their heads to take off the bottom. They can feed more efficiently in these areas. There are no absolute rules in fishing: that’s another thing you learn, and it’s not like we never catch fish off flats, because we do. Fish are going to be where their food is. But looking for the breaks are odds in your favor.

Q: How do you know for sure your on a break?

Genz: You want to see the depth changing from hole to hole, when you drill a lot of holes in a general area. We never you go fishing without a lake map, and we can see the zones we want to check just by looking at the map. This is kind of getting off the subject , but I’m a big user of GPS. Many times, a good spot is good from year to year, and once you find it one time, you can punch it in as a way point on the GPS and come right to it, even years later. I actually spend a lot of time in my home state Minnesota checking out possible winter spots with my boat. When I see something that looks promising, I’ll punch it in and return to it later on the ice.

But even without a GPS, you can pinpoint the edges of a dropoff, the tip of a point, a sharp inside turn, anything, by drilling some holes and reading down into them with an FL-8 rigged to an ice box. I like the new Ice-Ducer Vexilar came up with, because it’s got a long cord, and you can let out enough cord so the transducer lays flat on the ice, and you don’t even have to bend over to check the depth in a series of holes. We’ll have one person drill a bunch of holes, and another person come in behind checking them. If there’s snow on the ice, the hole checker can write the depth, and even notes about whether they sawfish or not, right in the snow.

In many ways, you have tremendous control in the winter, and you can do things you can’t do in the summer.

Q: So we’ll find more fish if we do nothing but choose dirty-water lakes and seek out dropoffs that are made of a marl. But do you have any other clues on types of spots likely to hold fish?

Genz: Sometimes, it’ll be a narrows where two deep-water sections come together. The breaks coming up and down off those areas will be the feeding zones, most likely. The fish don’t tend to be in the middle of the basin: a dropoff is what you’re looking for. And that seems to hold true, regardless of what species of fish you’re after.

On a dirty-water lake, if you eliminate the shallow water, where weeds grow in the summer, and the basins, what does that leave? The breaks.

Narrows are fish attractors everywhere, and they can be hot at first ice. But you have to be careful! The narrows areas tend to have natural current, and that can make for unsafe ice. Be absolutely sure the ice is safe before you go on it. Test it with a chisel, being very cautious.

Q: Now, let’s talk about lakes with clear water. Here, we have to take weeds into consideration, don’t we? In many lakes in the northern region, weeds are a factor in fish location, and yet most people tend to think of them mainly in a summer context. Do weeds hold fish in the winter?

Genz: Absolutely, and that’s the reason fish location is more difficult on a clear-water lake. The fish have more places they are likely to be. But you have to know the difference between good weeds and junk weeds.

Milfoil, for example, mostly falls down in the winter, so it doesn’t tend to hold many fish. A thick summer milfoil bed makes nothing more than a mat on the bottom most of the time in winter. I like cabbage and coontail better.

That type of weed is more likely to be standing under the ice, and if there’s light penetration-in words, if there isn’t too much snow cover on the ice, and we’ve had a lot of sunny days-these weeds can actually stay very green and even grow under the ice. That makes better cover for fish. But you have to know something about a lake to find the good weedbeds, and to locate the green weeds under the ice. A lot of people talk about looking for green weeds under the ice. A lot of people talk about looking for green weeds in winter, including some that actually show the location of traditional weedbeds.