Well we hit the big blue one early this morning starting at 6:00am. I would say the bite was SLOOOOOW, but it was non-existant. We moved several times and threw all we could for lures down the hole. We grafted a lot of smaller fish in schools up high, but nothing large. On the rare chance we got something to even look at our bait they never would commit. My fishing partner for the day caught one small mack about 4 lbs. Yes folks, I got skunked again for the second time in a row[pirate]. That is the BL for you. The macks are probably fat with sisco and white fish like bricks on the bottom. Too fat to even move.
There is some good news though, the ice is very hard and about 2 inches thicker than last week. We could see a lot of stress cracks from it getting thicker. Our holes would freeze over after a short while and we even had a couple of good rumblers run across the lake from the cracking. It appears the ice should last long to get back at the macks when they are hungry again. If their attitude does not change by next week I would bet the following week they should be back feeding again.
[#002850]Thanks for sharing that good Bear Lake info. Wish you could have gotten into the macks. But again, thanks for the ice conditions report.
I too kind of follow your theroy of the biguns being full of cisco.
My neighbor just stopped by and he went out on the rockpile with his snowmobile just to see how people were doing today. (He was not fishing). He reported seeing quite a few fish on the ice and one group of three guys had two really large lake trout and three nice cutts. Plus they had about 15 nice sized whitefish. I also spoke with some friends who fished on Friday (2/15) and they caught one limit of “keeper” whitefish between two of them, so the whitefish bite is getting better.
We were around around the corner south east of the rock pile looking for the larger fish. There was about twenty people spread out pretty far. We saw two other fish caught and most people were gone by noon. We could see there was a whole heck of a lot more people over on the rock pile so I imagine there was a few more fish caught over there due to the larger number of people fishing. From what we could see a lot of the people out deep on the far east end of the rock pile left around noon also. It did not appear that anyone was trying for whitefish where we were so I guess I should say my report was area specific.
My dad, brother and I hit Bear today got on the rockpile about 7:00. I thought that we did alright. Between the three of us we iced four trout and missed alot more. One of them was a mac about five pounds and and the rest pretty nice cutts keepers too, now that I know which fin is clipped. Also caught a few cisco and white fish. The bite died off about eleven. Saw a few others catching some trout nothing big though. When we got back to the condo and cleaned them out there wasn’t much ciscos in them, nothing like the fish I caught two weeks ago there they were chuck full. I think there getting ready for the fight.
It definetly sounds like the Rock was the spot. Years ago when I used to fish the rock, higher numbers of fish being caught there was the standard. The same with areas near the pump house on the east side. I could fish and catch half a dozen or more small macks and cuts easy. We would take home a tastey three or four founder and release everything else. Now when we go over we try to target the bigger macks in areas that we know we will catch less fish, but have better odds for the big boys. 
If we can pull it off we will try it again next Sunday. The only other place I would be interested going besides the BL is the Gorge and I have never been. Happy fishing.