Americana Outdoors E-Magazine - April 2019

ICE FISHING with Garmin Panoptix LiveScope

Danny Thompson from Garmin and the Walcheski brothers, John and Derek, embarked on a North American ice fishing adventure in sub- zero climates in Northern Minnesota. With a wind chill of -40 degrees on day one of their outing, the guys give us an inside look at what it’s like to fish out of a wheelhouse on the ice. “We’re up here in northern Minnesota on the west- ern side, fishing kind of a prairie pothole region lake, and it’s one of those mixed bag lakes, it has crappies in it, it has northern pike in it, it has wall- eye in it so I’m very excited to get out there and kind of see what we can get, I mean, you put your jig down and you never know what’s going to bite.” Danny continues. “This lake is known to have some giant crappies in it, up to 13-14 inches. So it should be a good time, I mean there’s a lot of fishermen out here so there’s a lot of pressure, but I think we’re going to be able to find ‘em with the Panop- tix and really get on these fish and also showcase what Panoptix can do for you out here.

We’ve got what’s called our wheelhouses, and we call themwheelhouses because they’ve got wheels on them. You can crank the house up when you’re trailering it down the road, and you can crank it down and set it right on the ice. They’ve got fur- naces in them, lights, TVs, ovens, stoves, it’s really like a camper on the ice, essentially. We’ve got our TVs going, plugged in through HDMI cables into these GPS map Garmin units. And we’re able to literally sit back on the couch and watch the fish come in on our 32 inch TVs.