Spring Bobbers ?

[Bob/MN]

Sounds much like a St. Croix spring. I have a pile of those in the closet that I got to retro-fit rods with the top-side guide and grommet. The St.Croix is a nice spring that up-ward hits can't get around. I also have a bunch of the Thorne springs made for panfish, but the line runs thru the spring body and on open ice in the cold they ice shut. I a warm shack they are fine and for a barrel spring type of strike indicator they are something else....super sensitive and they show those up-ward hits really well.

There are so many opinions flying around about strike detection that its hard to stay abreast of the innovations and impossible to make everyone happy with one idea. I guess this is what drives tackle creation and the ice fishing industry itself. Great stuff.

I have always gone by the quote" necessity is the mother of invention" If something doesn't work to my liking or need I will redo it or come up with something that works.
There are many variations of spring bobbers.
The barrel spring has been around for quite a while. The first models were ball point pen springs taped to the ice rods. Like you pointed out they would freeze up and were a bummer to thread.
I have a friend who still uses the ball point spring and made him a threader.( bottom item of the spring pictures)
None of this stuff is rocket science just plane common sense. :-)

[Crappie 1]

Bob, I would say they look pretty darn good.

[CTom]

Bob, I would say they look pretty darn good.

Ditto.

[no1son]

Those look good to me too. Both thought and experience went into making those.

What we all have in common here, is fishing the light bite. I do that year around anyway. I sorta gotta suspect that spring bobbers would increase a lot of folks open water catch, too. The highly sensitive rod tips have saved the day for me a lot of times.
Most of my crappie take comes from pretty much straight down, generally not more than ten to 15' off vertical even in summer; winter presentations work just fine year around. Even in a boat, I troll or drift to make contact and then hover over the school for the bulk of the take.

I fish the Minneapolis Park waters real heavy in all seasons. Half a dozen decent lakes within a few minutes drive on all sides of me and the river behind. Hard to launch a boat on one of those waters and I don't have one anyway nor a vehicle able to tow with either nor enough of a lot to park it in for that matter.

In winter those waters are all walk-on with no permanent shacks or any kind of vehicle allowed. All shanks' mare. So I don't do all that much running and gunning either. That's more a sport for younger men and those with the hauling capacity and legal ability to be much more mobile on the ice than is available for me, at least on the waters I prefer.

I don't use spring bobbers because they are just another delicate item to snag when the kit comes out of the back seat of my little car. (I will never buy another two door!) So I live on my soft tips with the flasher being another set of eyes in winter anyway. I have not yet started to use the flasher on the docks, but I think that would probably help there, too. I have modified all my rods, except the Mitchell Meat stick to larger but still light weight eyes using single legged fly guides. They usually tend to come with ones so small that they ice up too easily or are just too heavy for the action.

Since I fish in the open, I keep my kit as simple and as light as possible. In the winter my thumbs ache, if I do not keep them warm; so I rig up in the house and keep my car rods rigged. Tying knots in the cold simply doesn't work very well for me, and I suffer for it when I am not fishing. In the house I use magnification for tying the fine winter lines anyway.

Necessity is certainly the mother of invention, no where as obviously as fishing the hard water. Gotta love this sport.

In the end crappie fishing is still the light bite. Ignore it and you do need to put out a dozen rods to take your limits, and then only maybe. Spring bobbers are a very good approach, but don't quite fit my conditions.

[CTom]

I sorta gotta suspect that spring bobbers would increase a lot of folks open water catch, too.

Right after ice out and late fall until the harbors freeze over is when I do a lot of dock fishing. Why fiddle with the boat when you can drop a line straight down at your feet? Over the years I have found favor in shorter long rods and have indeed found a couple St. Croixs in 4.5 foot UL. I added the extra guide atop of the tip guide of each of these rods and have a St. Croix spring in each. One rod carrys 2 pound Vanish the other carries two pound Nanofil. The one with naon sees the use of heavier jigs and the spring is adjusted for those while the other gets used for lighter stuff and the spring is adjusted to reflect those light weights. I do like banging some heavier jigging spoons with full-sized plastics when the crappies tell me that they're willing to play hard and in those instances I simply re-rig, running the lines thru the conventional factory guides and jig away. On active fish like this springs are a joke and don't help at all....the hits are just crazy hard. Some of these spoons will weigh up to 1/8 ounce.

On the same couple of rods I have better luck on the springs when the water temps have dropped into the 40 degree range and I am targeting sunfish. Sunfish seem to have more radical mood swings than crappies and when they get in a funk I agree whole heartedly with the spring idiology. Sunfish can downright miserable to fish for after a cold front in cold water and the larger they get the harder they are to convince into hitting at times. For me springs have a place and a time all their own. One of the key aspects here is that the fish live in an environment entirely different from ours and they really don't know the different between open water and ice except for the water temp and how it plays on their metabolism. I am one who likes to go to the water well prepared but not having to carry the infamous kitchen sink. I have springs in with my summer tackle that can be added in a blink to my long rods should I ever find the need to use one at the time.

As a rule fishing in the winter stands as such with me.....if I have to slow things down to where I use a spring to see an upwards hit, I go home. The fish simply are not working fast enough to hold my attention. Noodles and somewhat stiffer rods are used more by me thru the winter for this reason. Like Dale, I have too many joints that don't want to function smoothly in the cold but when the mood hits me I still will have springs, noodles, and slightly heavier rods for my jigging.

[no1son]

CT,

Just because they are biting soft doesn't necessarily mean they are biting slow. It just means they are not willing to chase. That is when being right on the spot can take fish after fish on slackline and upbite takes, when you get the size and the color right. To me that says they are grazing on forage that cannot or generally does not flee, generally forage than is probably concentrated and not moving much nor capable of it, either.

When we started noticing that much larger bonus fish were not taking the tiny offerings any harder than the crappies, we started to to think that our quarry was actually adjusting intensity of take to what their forage at the time required. Like other predators they are not very likely to put out any more effort than necessary.

For the most part we do not know what will take out crappie offerings next, nor what size it will be until we set the hook, except that it is more likely to be crappies than anything else, since that is what we are targeting.

I fish the soft bite pretty hard, since that is the usual case I find myself fishing to all year around. If a dock holds crappies, it will generally have some sort of soft bite going some place along it pretty much as long as it is installed, with winter spots somewhere close by and very often close to spawning areas, too. We don't take many white crappies up here; they rove more over wider spaces than the blacks. Granted the blacks move around too, but are much more home bodies in areas that have what it takes draw them in the first place, more often moving up and down specific breaklines than moving over wide general areas.

[CTom]

The difference in observations can be wide Dutch. The waters we fish can also show a great degree of diffenerences in fish behavior. I'm either on the Zumbro or I'm on the Mississippi if I am ice fishing. On both waters I have areas that historically producer the larger, way more agressive feeding fish...that's where I fish. If the fish aren't in these locales, I go home. I won't waste time trying to entice medium to potato chip sized fish into hitting. That isn't fun to me. I'd rather catch four 14" crappies in a couple hours than thirty dinks an hour. And when these spots have fish on them, the fish are feeding hard and hit like trucks. On a locator they show up as a blip for about a second...they are aggressive and on the move. Most of these crappies will have small sunfish in their guts so they aren't doing the micro diet stuff. If I can get bit without the springs, thats how I prefer to get the job done. A very small minnow/plain hook with a micro-splitshot keeping it down can be deadly on crappies if they are getting fussy on a spring, but I don't see that happen often at all. If they'll take a swipe at a 1/8 jigging spoon with a 2" plastic hanging on it they certainly aren't hitting light.

I know you spend most of your time inside the metro and those lakes, given the amount of fishing pressure they see, can produce fish that have a real knack for light bites. I'm not denying that you run into that scenario up there. I just don't see it here because I am fishing water that doesn't see the pressure and the waters here are entirely different in make up from those you are on. The Zumbro has an inordinate amount of deep water with severely dropping shorelines. I don't fish on water any shallower than 28 feet, but I seldom have the line down more than 12'. One of my pet spots on the river has 33 feet where I fish and I hardly ever get below 18 feet there. Are there fish on the bottom in these places? You bet, tons of them. At times the bottom 4 feet will literally be moving with fish. Those fish aren't the ones that are feeding and cameras have shown big crappies right on the bottom with all of the other sizes. Put a bait down there and those large fisgh simply cannot be coaxed into hitting. Get that camera up in the mid column depths and you'll see crappies on the prowl but you'd better look quick because they are not just inching along. Every water produces its own style of bite, of that I am certain.

I've done that "slight angle change in the wire" type of bite before and I haven't the need to fiddle with those fish.

[Crappie 1]

I got a couple of what is called the Big Eye spring bobbers yesterday. I never bought this kind before. Their kind of long, might have to shorten them up some. Also the Son gat me an under water camera. It's an Outdoor Vision System-VS 400 It belonged to his boss, who sold his house, and was going to throw it out, so the kid grabbed it for me. It set in the guy's basement for 4 years, hardly ever used. Good deal for me.. Got the charger & all, can't wait to try it out.

[CTom]

Those cameras can be great education. I almost bought one a couple years back, but then I decided to start stepping away from the ice fishing a bit.

[Bob/MN]

As pointed out on a previous post the springs do a good job detecting lite bites and up bites. We have found out that when fishing for crappies a good % of the bites are a up bites. It seems like the bigger the fish the lighter the bite. There are exceptions when the fish are actively feeding and just about jerk the rod out of your hand. Unfortunately the active period is usually very short and we have to contend with the lite bite.
When the crappies and gills are running together It is fun the be able to predict the type of fish hooked before the fish is iced. Up bite crappie, down bite gill.
One other virtue of the spring is fishing with live bait. If the fish are mouthing and running with the bait you can follow the line down without being detected by the fish. This gives you a inch or two of wiggle room to work with.
One concern was storage of the spring when transporting the rods. With the HT spring system the spring is slid back to the rod tip. With the hybrid system the spring is removed from the front of the keeper and inserted into back of the keeper. With both systems the line is still threaded through the spring and the lure hooked to a keeper on the rod. With this type of a storage system the springs will not get a set in them.