Illuminating Ice Fishing Adventure on Yukon’s Squanga Lake

December 10, 2006 at 10:58 pm

Dave and I hit the hard water for a day of exploring and ice-fishing. My first time out this year, so no expectations just trying to get back in the swing (or jig) of things.

Dave is set up, power auger, herring, tip-ups, chairs, treated me like royalty. When you fish with someone who knows his stuff you just shut up watch and listen. Thats what I did. We both have never fished Squanga so some exploration was required. Drilled a few test holes and noticed it was shallow for quite a while.

We were on foot so moving another 100 meters at a time was good exercise but a bit time consuming. Finally we found the sweet 14 -30 feet of depth. We spread out jigging a hole and a tip -up in another. We used herring for scent and an assortment of the usual jigs and spoons just for fun.

Our goal was Pike with the hope of Whitefish as well. CHallenge is that Whitefish typically don’t/can’t bite on Pike lures. They like micro-jigs. It was interesting fishing multi-species with different set-ups. To our surprise our first fish was a burbot (aka ling).  This is like a cod and is properly names a poor man’s lobster. Great eating fish albeit on the very ugly and slimy side. We also caught a nice Pike that day. Don’t usually fish south on the Alaska highway but as per usual back home within a few hours. ANother great short day of fishing in the Yukon. I’ll save another story for tips/techniques and recipes for fishing burbot…a totally under-rated sport fish.

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