How To Enhance Your Ice Fishing This Winter With onX Fish

Ice, snow, slush, wind, and occasional sub-zero temps… Yes, all are part of ice fishing. Since you can’t just start up the outboard or trolling motor and easily cruise to the next spot, organization is key, especially on inclement days when you might have to set up and tear down your portable shack numerous times and “run & gun” to find fish. Or, you just pick a spot, plop down, and hope for the best—not always the most productive method, though. 

This is where planning comes in. You need to dial in a species, pick a lake, and then focus on lake areas that look promising. 

In the old days, information-gathering consisted of bait shop tips and bar stool rumors — and over the past decade or so, social media chatter. There’s nothing wrong with picking up information either way, but you might end up where everyone else is fishing, too… Yes, news travels fast, especially when it comes to hot ice fishing bites. 

There is a better way… and it’s easily accessible via your smartphone. It’s a fishing app called onX Fish that’s giving anglers an edge to find their own hot bites away from the crowds. You may recognize the name — yes, it’s the kid brother to onX Hunt — which has millions of users coast-to-coast. 

While there’s no end to the fishing apps available, only onX Fish is organized to provide the user with the power to compare fisheries data and choose the best lake for your individual mission and sought-after species. That might be Trophy Potential Lakes, Keeper Potential Lakes, or High Abundance Lakes, all searchable filters within the onX app, currently for the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and expanding into the rest of the Midwest shortly, then beyond. 

Ice Fishing with onX Fish Premium Filters 

The state fisheries data in onX Fish can be filtered out in a host of ways, which gives the trophy hunter, the catch & cook crowd, and those just looking for a lot of action a great way to find the perfect lake and are searchable by bluegill, crappie, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, perch, walleye, sauger, pike, and rainbow trout – or any species combination.  Simply select your species, then choose any of the following premium filters to highlight lakes on the map that meet your criteria with a small red icon.  

• Trophy Fish Potential – Once selected and lakes of interest are revealed, click on an individual lake for more information.  If you scroll down below Keeper Potential and Abundance (CPUE) you will find notes on the largest fish surveyed during recent years. For example, with regards to walleyes, in 2023, Minnesota’s Leech Lake produced a 28-inch fish; in 2021, a 31-inch fish; and in 2019, another 28-inch fish. With similar statistics, other lakes will also read: “This lake has a history of supporting trophy sized Walleye based on past surveys.” So, if catching a large photo walleye is on your list, this is a great way to separate lakes that have trophy fish from ones that don’t. 
• Keeper Potential: A good walleye keeper lake would be one with approximately 30% or more of selected fish species in the size range of interest, which you can read on the graph. However, pay attention to lake-by-lake restrictions and regulations to make sure you are aware of any special size mandates.  
• Species Abundance: To determine those lakes with high abundance, check the Abundance Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE) ratings based on measurements conducted by the Minnesota or Wisconsin DNR, which represents a snapshot population at a given point in time. You might notice that a lake is absolutely teeming with small crappies, but that might be exactly what you need to keep a group of kids occupied! 

Targeting Specific Species with the onX Fish app

One of the very cool things about the onX Fish app is you can target specific species (or a number of species) simultaneously. Four of the most sought-after species are walleye, crappies, bluegills, and pike. Yep, we don’t want to forget our tip-up and dark house buddies.

The question then arises as to what makes a specific lake good for any of these species. Well, for starters, using the Premium filters will help you dial in the kind of bite you’re looking for with respect to each species. For example, you might choose trophy potential bluegills. The lake might be a small natural (eutrophic) with big ‘gills present or a much larger, oligotrophic lake. Big bluegills can grow in many different environments. The real key is using the filter to identify those lakes that have not seen as much traffic as others, typically lakes farther away from metropolitan areas—although that isn’t always the rule, as in the case of crappies, where smaller, metro lakes can have both an abundance of smaller fish with some older year class unicorns swimming around, too. 

When it comes to walleyes and pike, trophy potential and keeper potential lakes are often larger and deeper, diverse ecosystems that hold lots of different kinds of forage. Large deep lakes often contain ciscoes and other pelagic baitfish that simply grow big walleyes and pike. But you might find smaller, stocked lakes where natural reproduction does not occur but hold plenty of food for the resident walleyes to get large. Again, use the filters to scroll through numerous years of surveys and find out what year classes are booming to determine the best lake(s) to fish. 

onX Fish Success Stories

We’ve had numerous interviews with early adopters, power users, and ambassadors/influencers who are using the app to gain confidence in finding and fishing new water. The Crappie Chronicles crew recently headed to the Hayward, WI area, to fish lakes they’ve never set foot on and had little to no information on. The result was a number of episodes filmed for their popular YouTube series, both with big crappies and numbers of them.

Crappie Chronicles host, Adam Bartusek, said, ‘We found flash bites and all day bites, without ever being in this area before. More importantly, we didn’t see a tire track or hole drilled in the majority of the lakes we fished. onX Fish is literally serving up bites for anglers, they just have to go out and fish them!”

Another onX fishing app user told us how he and his friends had heard about a lake in western Minnesota that held good numbers of large perch. He said that based on the minimal information (no lake name) they had, they were still able to zero in on a lake matching its description by using onX Fish app filters on about a dozen lakes in the general area. 

What they found was a lake that turned out to be an “outlier” with off-the-chart numbers of perch. Looking at the DNR sampling from 2019 and 2022 with off-the-chart species abundance, they hoped they perch that were surveyed would now be 10-inches or better. There were also fish surveyed in 2022 that were 11-12 inches that could be monsters. Long story short, they found plenty of quality perch. 

The user also noted that as back-up, they also used onX Fish to find the nearest high-probability keeper-size walleyes and were successful when they moved from the perch lake to another small lake they filtered through onX for an evening bite. 

These stories are not unique. Ice anglers are using onX Fish literally every day to find new lakes to fish all the gamefish species found in Minnesota and Wisconsin—many of them posting their successes like Adam and crew! 

Why Choose onX Fish This Winter?

onX Fish is a powerful tool to help winter anglers be better prepared with fisheries, weather, map, and GPS data all in one place – no switching between one app and several others to get all the information you need. You get precision targeting of species-specific locations, simplified navigation, real-time GPS weather for your exact location, in-dash display via Apple CarPlay, and detailed map layers with recent aerial imagery. All of this together at lightning-speed in the palm of your hand. No more map books, countless texts and social messaging, phone calls, and the rest. Hit the ice with confidence thanks to onX Fish.