Fishing the Sandhills • NEBRASKAland Magazine
Don't limit your search to the shoreline. In the summer, you
may find larger pockets of open water in the middle of a
lake. These deeper spots might also offer the cooler water
fish are looking for in the heat of summer.
The search for bluegills through the ice begins where it
always does: near vegetation. Early in the winter they may
be found in shallow water near cattails. Later, they may
move to deeper water. Look for patches of bulrushes poking
through the ice or for the leaves of pondweed frozen in the
ice. A teardrop and waxworm is the best bait through the ice.
Finding fish is the hardest part. If you're not catching fish,
move.
Other Species
A handful of Sandhills lakes hold other species, including
channel catfish, muskellunge, walleye, sauger and saugeye.
The tactics you use for those species won't differ much from
what you use in other waters.
Walleye and sauger have done well in some Sandhills
lakes through the years, and biologists are now stocking
saugeye, which like sauger tend to do better in turbid water,
to see if they do better. While anglers often target those fish
on drop-offs and points in large reservoirs, those underwater
structures are much more subtle in the Sandhills. Anglers
often catch them when targeting perch or crappies with jigs
or live bait rigs. Those targeting walleye sometimes fan-cast
small perch-colored crankbaits along weedlines at sunrise
and sunset, as perch are the main prey of this species in
these lakes.
Muskies can be caught in much the same way as northern
pike, but these fish are few in number and harder to find.
Lakes with harder bottoms support channel catfish. A
nightcrawler and stink or blood bait fished on the bottom
work as well here as in other reservoirs. If the lake bottom is
weedy or mossy, use a bobber to keep your bait just above it.
Guided by their dog, anglers cast toward the shoreline on a calm spring morning on Dewey Lake on the
Valentine National Wildlife Refuge.
