Dedicated Outdoorsmen: Advancing Your Gear

I am pretty confident in saying that 80% of Ice-fishermen enjoy Tip-up action!

I am definately in that percentage group, and im going to talk about products you can find at your local Canadian Tire or Wal-Mart.

Canadian Tire and Wal-mart... We all know that they dont have the greatest selection of ice-fishing gear out on the market. But rest assured that you can advance your low end gear.

I have spend most of my tip-up fishing using custom made tip-ups that my father created years ago. Over time, we made them better adding free spooling reels and a flaging system. But it came to my attention that our system still was not what i wanted it to be. I was loosing alot of fish, and alot of bait.

My soution to this issue came to me when walking through the fishing section at Wal-Mart here in Medicine Hat. South Bend has a windless tip-up with a flag system on it which caught my attention. I purchased 2 of these tip-ups and thought i would give it a whirl. I added a few extra things, such as South Bend Bells that i attatched to the flag, and also HT Polar Tip-Up line rated to 50lbs and red in color.

Thats it... That is all the modification i needed to do to these tip-ups.

Their are a couple of good advantages to this set up. First; You can leave it in your hole all day without the spool freezing over. Its a free spooling system, so when a fish grabs your bait, the flag releases. This is where the bells come in handy, you dont have to be staring your tip-up down all day, when you hear the bell, you know you've got a bite! Second; The red line is great because red is the first color that loses transperancy in the water, which means the fish will have a hard time being distracted from your line attatched to the bait.

Again, that is it. A simple system for tip-up fishing.