Many anglers will often overlook “size” as a critical presentation characteristic when it comes to ice fishing and choosing baits like a spoon.
Anglers often like to tinker with different plastic tippings or bait colors, but in some situations that might be a big waste of time and energy.
As Tony Roach states in the video above, there are many times when fish are keying in on a specific size of forage. Certain bodies of water can carry different sized forage from year to year based on the success of different year classes of perch, cisco or shiners in the lake. If the walleyes in your lake are primarily feeding on smaller shiners, they might completely turn their nose to larger sized spoons, and vice versa with bigger ciscoes and smaller spoons.
Let’s take the Northland Buckshot Rattle spoon as an example. This ice fishing spoon comes in six different sizes from 1/16th oz up to a 3/4 oz. Often times a simple switch from a 1/8oz to a 1/4 oz can make all the difference.
Next time you’re on the ice and the walleyes aren’t biting, try upsizing or downsizing your bait. That little change might make a huge difference.