home is where the... crappie are?

I lived here going on a decade and with the abundance of waters surrounding my home there is always somewhere new to pioneer. This is Lake County Illinois after all, and home to the Fox Chain of Lakes. It makes it sometimes so easy to bypass some of those small waters right outside your front door.

My neighborhood, just like many others, is speckled with many flood bearing retention ponds. Most of them are tiny but a couple have both the size and depth to support some healthy populations of fish. I've always known that some of the local kids and adults alike have had success with some pretty nice largemouth here. What I never knew that there was such a robust population of crappies. Even more surprising is that those ponds I thought to have no more then a maximum depth of 5 feet were actually closer to 10. Hmm?

This morning I snuck out for 30 mins to test the waters. Two holes were drilled in the basin area of this little pond. The reality is I couldn't get the bait down half way before a flash mob of fish were rising up after it. Half a dozen crappies and nearly a dozen gills came through the ice before deciding to call it quits. Not bad for a short morning. Since there is a solid 3 inches and growing, I plan on taking my son back out here in the next day or so. It will be good to get him on some fish and give some of these larger bodies of water a little extra time to solidify.

ice fishing my subdivision ponds

Sometimes its easy to overlook somethings so obvious.