Jon B. has pulled off one of the more unusual feats in ice-fishing content this spring, drilling a four-foot-square "sight hole" through 16 inches of ice on Moosehead Lake in northern Maine and hand-jigging to three trophy brook trout he could watch finning in the water below his feet.
The trip, filmed over two days on his last outing of the Maine ice season, yielded fish the Texas-based creator called the second-biggest brook trout of his life — a male estimated at "well over 20 inches" and "close to a 5 lb trout" — plus a colour-packed hen and a solid male jack that all ate either a rattle bait or a small Frostbite spoon.
"One of the most exciting things in fishing is visually watching a fish eat your lure, and today we're going to be doing that in the extreme," Jon B. tells viewers at the top of the video, before drilling out a block of ice large enough to lie over and peer through.
The technique, popular in parts of Canada and Vermont, is closer to spearfishing rigging than conventional ice fishing. An ice auger punches the perimeter, a hand-saw joins the holes into a square, the freed slab is pushed under the remaining sheet, and a blackout hub tent is pitched on top to kill glare. The angler then lies on the ice and watches fish approach directly.
"Rather than using electronics or mapping to find fish, we are 100 percent going to be hopefully, again, fingers crossed, watching these fish dart through here and chase our lures," Jon B. says. "It's almost like open water fishing through the ice."
The lake targeted is Moosehead — Maine's largest — where native brook trout still push into the four-to-seven-pound class in a fishery Jon B. calls "one of the best brook trout fisheries probably in the world, you know, next to like Labrador and Nova Scotia."
Over the next several hours he lost a bigger male on a rattle bait strike, then boated a stunning female.
"To catch them visually like that is just pinnacle," he says after landing the first. "Look at the size of that male brook trout. Look at that specimen … a perfect example of what Maine truly is."
Late in the session, after switching to a smelt-imitating Frostbite spoon and then dead-sticking it on Asher's advice, the big male finally committed — an eat visible from start to finish through the open water of the sight hole.
"That fish has come in this hole three times and we finally got her on the dead stick," Jon B. says. Measured against his bump board the fish went a little over 22 inches — short of his personal best 24-inch Maine brookie but the second-biggest of his career.
The video doubles as a soft conservation pitch. Jon B. stresses that Moosehead's trophy class has been earned over decades and that the population is fragile after historical over-harvest.
"I know you can keep brook trout, and I have nothing against it," he tells viewers. "But if you want big fish to live and continue to thrive in places like this, whether it be trout, bass, musky, carp, bluegill, whatever, proper fishing skills … and also catch and release is super super super important."
All three fish were revived in the hole and released.
