It’s amazing how many anglers have an underwater ice fishing camera for winter use, and forget to pack it in the boat for fishing opener. In fact, open-water applications abound when it comes to everything from species identification, to finding green weeds, or simply identifying water clarity traits from one end of the lake to another.

The fact that now your underwater camera for fishing can be so much more mobile is a major benefit to its use, and the fish-finding information you unlock with it is rather limitless. Here’s just a few ways and reasons to get more use from your winter camera, come spring, summer and fall.

If you’re a crappie angler, one of the best bites of the year has come and gone with the early spring crappie bite. For bluegill fans, the best is yet to come, as we move from a shallow water period for one species into another.

There’s no doubt that the spawning season for crappies and bluegills offer some great opportunities for skinny water panfishing, and even sight fishing, which makes fishing feel like it did when you were a kid.

Bobbers and small jigs are plopped into any good looking developing weeds or brushy areas, only to drop with an aggression not seen since the previous year’s fishing It’s hard not to be excited about it.

Press Release – New Hope, MN (9/29/21) – Marcum Technologies, the undisputed leader in ice-fishing-specific sonar and cameras, takes tech to the next level. Their long-held principle is that features are useless unless they help an angler catch fish, and that can be seen throughout decades of innovation. Patented technology like moveable zoom that led to angler’s ability to target fish anywhere in the water column was the first ping heard round the world among the ice sonar community. They followed it up with additional advancements to help distinguish echoes from noise in an interference rejection system so advanced, it’s also patented.

Who doesn’t have boxes of jigs laying around?  No matter the species, it could be the most universal, widely copied, and versatile lure of all time.  If we’re talking live bait, it’s the best delivery method for meat that I know of.  If plastics, well there’s usually a jig involved here too. 

Starting with a standard jig-head, you have to think about what you’d like to do with it. If you’re threading on a fathead minnow, a will be the logical choice. The same can’t be said if you’re looking to fish plastics, as plastics fish best with an aggressive wire keeper.

As for other features and color, think about the water clarity you’ll be fishing in. Anything with a blade or propeller adds flash and vibration, which may be a necessary part of the presentation. Big minnows call for a , and suspended fish call for a that rises above a weight on the bottom. So many jigs, so many scenarios, but you need to match the style of jig to the type of fishing you’ll be doing.

“There’s just no other family of systems on the market that serve the bulk of the ice-fishing public like MarCum,” says ice pro Joel Nelson. “Whether you’re a shallow, weedy-water bluegill angler from the south of the ice belt, or you fish deep Canadian Shield lakes for walleye and lake trout, there’s a perfect MarCum for you.”

The dog days of summer and that’s your green light to grab your MarCum flasher or digital system from the garage and give it a once over and top off the battery.

The first step in your pre-season routine should be checking your batteries. Most flasher failures on the ice are caused by a bad battery, so now’s the time to inspect your MarCum’s power source.

“You could be kicking yourself later if you don’t take a minute to check everything out now,” says MarCum Pro-Staffer, Joel Nelson. “Nothing will wreck a good day of fishing faster than a bad battery, because there’s nothing you can do about it out on the ice.”

Every year, a new set of anglers both young and old learn to use ice fishing sonar or flashers for the first time.  That said, I encounter many anglers on the hardwater each year that still have their ice sonar depth finder on default factory settings from when they bought the unit 10 years ago.  Whether you’re brand new to the game, or it’s old-hat, here are some answers to age old questions along with new ones to keep it interesting and catch more fish.

Water temperatures that build into the high 60 and 70 degree marks will definitely get fish moving, and that usually coincides with a few hatches.
Bugs crawling out of the deep mud get rafted against the main-lake structure, and signify some of the initial pushes to offshore humps, bars, and reefs. It’s often when casual walleye anglers, or those who see early mixed bags of walleyes with crappies and gills, stop catching them.

Anglers don’t always follow, sometimes because they’re not required to. This is a dynamic time of year as the summer food chain ramps up production. That means anglers don’t always have to look deep to find fish, and several patterns can be going at the same time.

Many times, these locations are consistent producers during all months, yet others are specifically good for ice and not during the bulk of the open-water period.  The latter types include shallow transitions from mud to sand, or sand to rock, as well as small gravel or rock patches marooned again in shallow weeds or non-like surrounding substrates.

Early ice fish push to these places, especially after sundown in clear-water systems.  Spots that are no larger than a kitchen table can seem impossible to drill out and find, while they stick out like a sore thumb once you drop the camera needed to discern sand grains from gravel.

Basic sonar technology is a great asset to ice anglers during the summer and fall months, as few things hide from it, even in heavy weed cover or timber.  Even if you don’t own this technology, chances are you know someone who does, or better yet, invest in a unit that does both sonar and GPS so your ice spots will transfer to summer and vice versa.  Spend time getting to know the system in either case, and make sure to idle at the proper pace to provide the very best image you can. 

We’re nearing the end of walleye season in MN, and things have gotten a bit tougher. Snow is deep and ice is thick(er), and the amount of available light at depth has been cut dramatically. Your early season haunts are likely nowhere near where you are ice fishing now, and at this point, it’s more about just getting bites rather than talking about how many you’re catching.

Minnesota’s early May fishing opener is a date most avid walleye anglers have circled on the calendar, but long before May is the pre-opener down on Pool 4 of the Mississippi River.  Warm spells in February, all the way through the traditional opening day, offer anglers a great chance at not just knocking the rust off, but catching both numbers and size for walleye and sauger both.  
As Joel Nelson says, “There’s no better feeling than the slight “tick” of the rod tip or a line-jump as a shallow-water walleye inhales some plastic. “

New Hope, MN (10/25/2021) – Marcum Technologies, the undisputed leader in underwater viewing, takes an on-ice staple and improves it with lighter, longer-lasting lithium batteries.  A new generation of anglers takes for granted what cameras have brought to the sport.  Inline reels and the effect of lure-spin was revealed through watching fish swim away on an underwater camera.  Winter panfish location and the connection to green standing aquatic plants, along with countless other observations; all brought to you by underwater viewing, now made better with a little help from an advanced fuel source.

“They’re right where we left them,” I blurted while quickly dropping another small sucker to whoever was stealing them below. It was a private thought that worked its way out on last season’s first-ice-foray. I was pretty certain they were walleyes, as I’d fished them in the months leading up to ice. They remained right off of a point on the first shoreline break where we’d had two flags fly before drilling the rest of the holes. We jigged up a few perch and walleyes amongst those tip-ups right at dark, before gingerly creeping back to shore. We were on solid ice, a good 6 inches of it, but you never can be too careful. Even when well-prepared, I’m not the guy creeping on a few mere inches like I once was. Age, kids, and some dodgy experiences will do that to you.

“Before underwater cameras, I used to think that certain weed-beds held bass, and others had the panfish I was after.  Careful study and lots of on-ice viewing showed that most often, the best weeds and weedbeds held both, but few panfish roam edges or openings in the presence of predators.  Two-feet can be too far if you’re trying to get a bull gill to come from cover and eat.  Punch a hole right on top of them, where they don’t have to leave the safety of cover, and you can pluck them from where you never thought they existed.”

Two decades ago, MarCum released its first underwater video camera with a monitor for fishing, giving eyes below the surface to an entire generation of anglers.  Their world has been forever changed because of it, from the way modern ice anglers fish to the equipment they use, underwater viewing has shaped the evolution of the sport.  While the systems themselves have also evolved through the years, the one thing that remains consistent over time is the amount of information anglers glean when seeing underwater for the first time. These MarCum underwater cameras can be used for ice fishing, freshwater, and saltwater fishing.