The Little Things

      For many years now IceShanty.com product tester Pete Nowak a.k.a. (Big Pete) and I have haunted many a Northeastern Wisconsin lake. Deep into the night we search for the elusive walleye. We've spent countless hours on the ice, staying till our normal pick up time of midnight when things are not happening and many times much later than that when the bite is on.

Pete always seemed to dominate in the northern pike catch. For some reason which I still don't know why, I have always done better for walleyes that is up until last season. After hitting the same lake many nights in a row, Pete was dominating the walleye catch by at least two to my one every night. Now I know one thing, for years he's always used my exact set up with minor changes so I had a hunch he just had to be doing something different. Could it be that finally the luck had changed hands? So I gave in and asked him, "What the heck are you doing different this year?" As always he gave his usual reply, "Not much."

Pete is always tinkering with his setline rigs, raising them, lowering them, hooking the minnow in different places and tying on all sorts of trinkets and lures. I noticed something while we were landing a walleye. We always help each other land fish, but usually only when they are big ones. He had gotten a monster on and asked me to hand grab it for him. He carefully brought it into the hole, let it float up and I grabbed it. Upon landing this puppy I saw he had a Swedish Pimple tied on. This is not uncommon since we've been using Swedish Pimples for over a decade. But there was an extra trinket, a little red bead tied above the pimple, which is another thing we've used for a long time and have been very successful with the beads for eyes. But what he did was combined the two. He strung the bead on and then tied on a Swedish Pimple. Could that be the difference?

Now he had caught a lot of fish out of this hole, so I thought it was just a hot hole but when we switched lakes and Pete nailed more fish and not to mention his biggest walleye ever on that same bead and swede rig I really began to wonder and started to put it together. He then told me that almost all of his walleyes were caught on the bead and Swede this year, it was his hottest setup, where ever he put the tipup with that rig on was always his hottest hole no matter what lake we were on. So after all the different things he tried, something as simple as adding a bead to the Swedish Pimple made a good rig a killer rig.

Pete Nowak's Bead-N-Swede Tip-up Rig