Americana Outdoors E-Magazine - April 2019

I’ve got my two good buddies, Josh Walcheski and his brother Derek out here on the ice with me, and they’re probably some of the best ice fishermen that I know, they always catch fish, and they’ve really kind of helped design these Livescope and these Panoptix units, and tried to make ‘em set up for what an ice angler wants. With Livescope, it gives you so much more clarity than even Panoptix gave you. We’ve been seeing some northern pike come through the house, you can see their tail paddling as they go by. You can pick out individual fish. And it’s true to scale, so if you see a fish that’s a foot long on the screen, that fish is a foot long, unlike when you get your other marks, like on traditional nat. So Livescope is re- ally kind of the latest cutting edge thing right now, and having it in a fish house is pretty cool. So our first night in the wheelhouses was quite fun. We all jumped into my house because I’ve got the 32 inch TV set up to the 8610, we had a lot of bites, lots of bluegills, lots of small crappies, we caught a couple of nice crappies, too. Overall, a really good evening in the wheelhouse, it was fun. On the second day, we took a little bit different of an approach. We kind of left the hard houses back in the bay where we were catching a lot of those pan- fish. Wewanted to target and go after some big slab crappies and we knew they were out on the main lake, the snow is really deep out there, but we know the big fish are out here, so it’ll definitely pay off. We picked out some spots we thought there’d be some big fish, and we’re kind of on a nice point right there. Typically these crappies in this lake are actually relating to structure. So it’s a nice big un- derwater point that came out and the crappies are literally just kind of following that structure around. What we’re doing is trying to stay in front of them and follow them around as well, and so we set up on the tip of the point, we dropped in the Panoptix, we found this school, and

Seen above is Garmin’s Livescope. You can see all the crappie suspended just above the bottom. In the top left of your screen is a fish being reeled in.

A beautiful looking crappie that will make for an excellent sandwhich.

Danny and the Walcheski Brothers brave the elements while following a school of crappie.