It started with a text

Lying in bed on a Tuesday night, about to fall asleep, a buddy shoots you a text asking if you get time off from work.  You don't think much of it initially, perhaps he is just trying to plan a fishing outing for the approaching weekend.  Curiosity ensues and a conversation starts about fishing an NAIFC tournament in South Dakota the following weekend...


Many of you reading this don't know what NAIFC is an acronym for let alone what it entails; but long story short, it is the North American Ice Fishing Circuit and it is the longest tenured, top level competitive ice fishing circuit in North America.  It's the "big leagues" of United States competitive ice fishing, if you will...

Plans are made and before you know it the following Wednesday evening the GPS on your truck says that you will arrive in Webster, South Dakota 435 miles and six hours later.  Doing your due diligence you start to gather intel about the lake via various sources and all are saying the same thing; the perch fishing in Northeast South Dakota, as a whole, has been very difficult this winter.  Too much fishing pressure, over harvesting, falling water levels, etc could all be reasons why; but the bottom line is that this will pose a serious challenge for you and your partner along with the entire field competing in the tournament that weekend.  To top it off the city of Webster; the town where you're staying at, had a water main break and didn't have drinkable water since Monday with no set time for repair.

Sounds like fun, right?

The tournament was on Bitter Lake which is just south of the town of Waubay, SD in the famed glacial lakes region of Northeast South Dakota.  For those who fish, this area has been a Mecca for jumbo perch as well as great walleye, pike, and panfish and Bitter Lake has been no exception.  The NAIFC tournament on Bitter the year prior yielded the top two teams who surpassed a one pound average for their bag of sixteen perch.  So the potential was there to hook into some great perch with the possibility of landing truly a exceptional fish in the process.

Now Bitter Lake is roughly 18,700 acres so it's a big lake, compared to lakes I'm accustomed to fishing here in Iowa, and my experience prior to that week was fishing it for a few hours for walleyes a few years ago.  So needless to say I did not have a lot of confidence nor knowledge of the lake, but welcomed the challenge with a potential to catch some great fish.

Beautiful hills of NESD

My tournament partner for this event, Chad Angell, is a buddy whom I have never fished with as a teammate in a tournament but have competed against in numerous tournaments.  Chad is a very skilled angler and an accomplished tournament fisherman who has won more than his fair share of tournaments in Iowa.  So needless to say I felt confident we would at the very least give our best effort as a team trying to locate and catch fish.

Thursday morning arrives with Chad and I discussing some areas we were going to hit and we split up to fish those locations and would relay information about our findings via text or phone.  We hit the water from 8:00 am till a little after 5:00 pm and most of the day for us yielded smaller perch and walleye with a couple keeper walleyes thrown in.  Feeling pretty down about the quality of fish I was seeing, I text Chad later in the afternoon how he was doing and he sent me a picture of four pretty nice perch so I headed over to meet up with him and we finished out the afternoon in this area.  He said that some locals as well as other teams fishing the tournament were fishing this area and that they were dropping way points, so we knew that we had one location which had potential.  To provide confirmation of our suspicions I caught a one pound one ounce perch prior to leaving this spot Thursday evening.

Handful of nice perch Chad caught

Plenty of ice on Bitter Lake, measuring between 30-36+ inches of ice

Game plan Friday consisted of more thoroughly working over this area to see what it yielded but unfortunately many of the other teams in the tournament were also doing the same.  We found that while the numbers were there, the size of the fish was getting smaller and they were becoming less apt to bite due to the fishing pressure.  We started to work out from the group in search of comparable areas using our lake maps, when I happened upon a really good school of perch that were more then happy to bite.  I quickly text Chad a picture of seven perch consisting of two one pound, one 3/4 pound, and four smaller 7-8" perch and told him to come over quickly.  We worked this spot over for about another hour and landed quite a few more one pound perch and capped it off with a 13" 1.5 pound perch which I caught.

13" yellow perch

13" yellow perch

We split up again to search for more spots and I was able to locate another promising location where I caught a 14 ounce perch and some smaller perch and Chad was able to locate another spot which yielded another 13" perch and several other 3/4 to 1 pound perch.

14 ounce yellow perch

Chad's 13" yellow perch

In the early afternoon, I worked over another area in the basin and came upon another group of good perch capped off with a personal best for me.  I was fortunate enough to stick a 14.5" 1 pound 13 ounce yellow perch!  I quickly packed up my gear as there was other teams in the area and headed over to another location to put water into my bucket and take some quick pictures on my measuring board.  I tried to get a hold of Chad but was unable to; fortunately I was able to get a hold of a good friend and set out to meet up with him and his partner so that I could have some quick pictures taken and then release the fish back where I found her.  On the way back to the spot, I came across Chad and showed him my perch and I'm not sure if his eyes or the perch's belly were bigger but needless to say he was very excited.

New personal best yellow perch 14.5" 1 pound 13 ounces

New personal best yellow perch 14.5" 1 pound 13 ounces

14.5" yellow perch

1 pound 13 ounce yellow perch

As the day concluded, we were feeling pretty good about our success on Friday and kept wishing the tournament had been on that day as we felt that we would have put together an excellent bag of 16 perch somewhere in the 16-18 pound range.

Saturday we stayed off of our spots and thankfully the other anglers did as well.  We tried several other areas with only a small walleye to show and no perch.  We hoped that our patterns would still remain the following day but with perch you never know.  The perch weren't tied to any one piece of structure or brush pile and were just roaming the basin, so they could be here today and gone tomorrow.  At the rules meeting that night we drew second place in the launch order, so our hopes were really high of a promising finish the following day.

Sunday rolls around with strong winds out of the ESE and overcast most of the day but the temps were above freezing so it wasn't all that unpleasant.  After inspection we launched at 7:30 but had our first mishap of the day as Chad's four wheeler died about 200 yards from the launch.  The motor was seized up so we threw his GPS, flasher, a few extra batteries for my auger, and his three rods in my shack and he climbed on the back of my Arctic Cat Bearcat snowmobile and set out for our fishing spot.

We get to our spot and I start punching holes with Chad following by checking for activity with his Vexilar flasher.  He honed in on one spot which provided some marks on the bottom and we punched numerous other holes in that area.  8:00 am starts and we commence fishing, within five minutes Chad hooked up with the big fish of the tournament (a 14" 1.92# beast) and I added a really nice 1.0-1.1# perch.  Feeling pretty good about our start we work over the area and add some more fish.  Fishing dried up in this spot about mid morning and we saw some anglers catching fish on the edge of the community spot, so we headed over in that direction and added another half dozen fish but weren't impressed with the size we were catching nor the other fish which anglers had caught there.

We then went to the spot Chad had success on Friday and while we marked a few fish, none were interested in biting so we went back to our original location and were able to upgrade 5-6 of our fish there.  We had five smaller perch which were all similar in size and we needed the biggest three out of those fish, when mishap #2 occurred.  My scale wasn't working and I asked Chad if we could use his scale and he said "Sure, but it's in my four wheeler near the launch" which we both got a chuckle out of.  I had a back up hanging scale but it proved to be pretty worthless as it only weighs in pounds and ounces and not fractions of ounces so we opted for the eyeball method for the remaining three fish for our bag.

We packed up our gear and headed towards the weigh in with hopes that our bucket of perch was enough to finish in the top three but not completely certain that it would be enough to win.  It was a tough bite on Sunday compared to earlier in the week and we were competing against some of the best ice anglers across the country.

Some good friends from Iowa were able to help tow Chad's four wheeler back to the parking lot and load it onto his trailer.

Chad getting a tow back to the boat ramp

The weigh in commences to find us competing against 25 teams from 10 different states, a number which shrank from 31 teams the day prior.  Our team number was called with six buckets after us, so we were uncertain what our outcome would be.  If so inclined, I have included a link to the weigh in HERE.

Siting in the "hot seat"

Chad and I were able to finish in first place with a weight of 10.04 pounds, edging out second place by almost two pounds.  Chad's big perch also won big fish for the tournament and netted a cool $380.

Top three teams

Our bag of 16 yellow perch

Chad's monster 1.92 pound yellow perch

We tried numerous presentations throughout the week, but settled on Chad fishing a Northland Forage Minnow jigging spoon and myself using a Clam Bomb spoon with our best results tipping the spoons with wax worms.

Needless to say, it was a surreal experience as this was the first NAIFC tournament I have fished in and to finish in first place and against some of the best ice fishermen in the country left nothing but a big smile on my face and pure joy in my heart.  It certainly made the trip home a lot more exciting with phone calls and messages from friends sending their congratulations as well as sharing stories from the trip.

Beautiful South Dakota sunset