Travel On Ice: Jigging Sebago Lake - The Fisherman

Travel On Ice: Jigging Sebago Lake

author
The author with a large laker that took a Zoom Fluke fished on a jighead.

When the weather goes cold, the lakers of Sebago are just starting to heat up!

Well, it’s January and it’s time to hang up the rods, sit around and relive all the memories of the season, watch old movies, classic TV reruns and count the days until the change of season forces Old Man Winter to relax his icy grip. Right? I work at Lucky Bait and Tackle in Warren, RI, and nothing pains me more than seeing sad anglers coming in during the winter acting like they’re living out a prison sentence because it’s cold outside. I know that too many of you reading this do exactly what I just described every winter, but I’m urging you to try something new in 2023. I also know that many of you have a skewed mental image of what ice fishing is: sitting around freezing your butt off on some windswept lake, praying for a flag to fly. But that’s not how we roll on Sebago Lake.

Sights Of Sebago

Picture this, you’ve ridden out to a juicy piece of bottom structure on a snowmobile. You drill a couple holes and drop the transducer of your fishfinder into the icy water. As the picture reads out on the screen, you see a sizeable cloud of bait gathered on the ledge. Armed with a jigging rod, you send a jig down to the bottom and begin a gentle jigging motion. With your eyes on the screen, your jig appears as a faint ‘zig-zagging’ line, suddenly a wolf pack of large marks appears on the screen and several break away, racing for your jig – it’s almost like watching a streaking bluefin running up for your Butterfly Jig offshore. The speeding marks close the gap in seconds as you brace for impact.

Sebago Lake is probably one of my favorite places on the planet. Every time I step out of the car into that brisk Maine air, I feel like I have to pinch myself. The scenery will take your breath away and the sheer size of the lake will leave you feeling like you’re standing at the edge of a frozen inland sea. Sebago Lake is the deepest lake in Maine at 316 feet (with a median depth of 101) and it’s also the second largest; there are 45 square miles of water here, and 114 miles of shoreline! (I call it a ‘trout masterpiece’). And all of this is nestled into Cumberland County, which makes it easily accessible for anglers across southern New England. Sebago is just under 150 miles from Worcester Massachusetts, 165 miles from Providence, Rhode Island and 210 miles from Hartford, Connecticut, mere day trips from any one of these major hubs.

rob
Capt. Robbie Taylor with another big Sebago laker. Photo courtesy of Newport Sportfishing Charters

Playing The Lakers

If you ask me, there is no better fish to target through the ice than a lake trout. They are aggressive, they get huge and they fight like angry bulldogs. The thing I might like best about these fish is that the way they smash a jig, they will come up 30 or 40 feet at times to crush a bait and the aggression is apparent immediately when you feel it on the rod. Something else I love about these fish is that you never know how big the fish could be, just this past September an angler trolled up an 18-pounder from Sebago and there are definitely larger ones in there.

Last year a group of friends and I headed to Sebago for a few days of all-out ice fishing – the trip was nothing short of epic. Each day we’d take snowmobiles out a few miles onto the ice and set up in about 150 feet of water over some big humps. If you can find humps, rocks or even wrecks out there, you’re going to catch fish. One thing I noticed was that the lakers seem to love ‘saddles’, low spots between two higher points.

On the first day of our trip, we set up and I was seeing a ton of bait on my screen. It didn’t even take 20 minutes for the first fish to grab my jig. I landed the fish and felt like I had been lifted into heaven, the fish was fat and healthy and lit up with such beautiful colors. I paused to take a quick photo and then the bite exploded, everyone was hooking up. One guy would call out, “big school at 50 feet!” And we often couldn’t get our baits all the way down to the called out depth before a fish would crush it. We were catching most of the fish on soft plastic swimbaits on jigheads.

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A selection of the jigs and lures that will get it done on Sebago Lake.

Bait & Baits

There is an abundance of bait species in the lake including alewives, yellow perch, whitefish, suckers and smelt—among many others, and the name of the game when looking for lakers is definitely, ‘find the bait’. Most of these baitfish are between 3 and 7 inches in length, work within that range to find what they want. There were five standout lures that really worked for me, the first was a 4-inch white Keitech swimbait threaded onto a half-ounce VMC Moon Eye jighead—the heavier head helps it get down to the deepest depths. Next was a 5-inch Zoom Fluke in pearl color, paired with a 3/8-ounce Gotcha jighead. Third in line is the New England saltwater favorite, the 1-ounce Ron-Z in pink color, these baits literally catch everything with fins! Number four was a 4-inch Strike King white pepper tube, jighead style not as important here. Last was a 5/8-ounce Little Cleo in silver or gold and red; these little spoons worked best when the fish were being super aggressive using a technique called ‘chasing’. Two honorable mentions would be the Bill Lewis 3/8-ounce Rat-L-Trap in silver and the Cicada Bladebait in gold color – weights vary depending on depth.

When the fishing isn’t going off with a fever pitch bite like what I experienced last year, the best bet is to drop your jig to the bottom and either ‘pound the bottom’ by lifting and dropping the jig over and over or cranking it up two to three cranks and jigging it lightly in place. The “chase” technique I described above works either when the fish are being super aggressive or super sluggish. Basically, you allow a tin to flutter all the way to the bottom and then rip/reel it up until you’re about half-way up and then repeat the process again. You can use any lure you want for this, but I like it best with the Little Cleo or a Rat-L-Trap.

SPECIAL REGS & SPECIES
It’s pretty much common knowledge that Sebago Lake is known for its landlocked salmon. The salmon population has taken a bit of a hit over the past decade because the exploding lake trout population has been outcompeting the salmon for their preferred forage; smelt. More recently, the state has implemented special regulations for Sebago Lake that allow anglers to keep as many lakers, (or ‘togue’ as they are called locally), as they want, as long as they measure less than 26 inches and one measuring 26 inches or greater. In addition, any other species of trout caught must be released immediately. If you make the trip, definitely read the lake regulations yourself before drilling your first hole. Another species that will test your tackle here is the smallmouth bass. There are great numbers of bronzebacks in the lake and they will readily strike many of the baits used for lakers.

My go-to jigging setup is a Frabil Ice Hunter 28-inch jigging rod paired with a Penn Fierce size 100. This rod has a soft tip but also lots of backbone, a unique combination that you need when fishing for big fish in deep water – both for fish control and setting the hook firmly at these depths. You might be surprised to hear that I use just 6-pound line, but it’s necessary to reduce drag and to pack enough line on the spool. My line of choice is 6-pound Suffix Performance Ice Braid, this braid is hydrophobic so it repels water which mitigates freezing issues and it’s highly abrasion resistant which helps immensely when the line contacts the ice during the battle. The last piece the puzzle is a XX length of 8- or 10-pound fluorocarbon leader tied direct to the jig.

Sebago Lake is amazing and I would consider it bucket list fishing destination for anyone that fishes in New England. Because of its size, Sebago is often one of the last lakes to freeze in southern Maine, but as long as we don’t have a unseasonably warm December, Jordan Bay is usually covered with safe ice by mid-January, the rest of the lake usually follows in February (keep an eye on the fishing reports from Kittery Trading Post for news of safe ice). Ask anyone who’s fished here and they will tell you that it’s worth it. Any chance I get to make the trek, you can bet I’m going to find a way to make it happen and I hope to see you out there!

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