When I go ice fishing I don’t have the luxury of having all the electronics and all the gear that can possibly be purchased for ice fishing, so I have learned how to adapt in a few ways. One way is to use the reel on my ice fishing rods as depth finder. Water depth is often an important piece of information when fishing and without a depth finder or a flasher, it can be hard to guess based on the amount of line you let loose from your spool. But there is an easy way, simply use the amount of line spooled per turn of your crank handle to measure.
Finding out how much line your reel cranks in is easy. I use 20 feet as the reference point. To do this, I first get my measuring tape and layout 20 feet on my deck.
Then hook your lure in lightly at the beginning of your measuring tape.
Un-spool your line back to the 20 foot mark, then crank it back to the lure, counting the number of turns. Divide 20 feet by the number of turns and you will know how many feet per turn of the crank handle. Next time you are out fishing, drop your lure to the bottom, crank it up and do the math.
Do this for all your reels. The feet per turn of the crank will vary with the size of the spool as well as how much line you keep on your reel. For my two reels, the amounts are 2 feet per turn
and 1.9 feet per turn. So I just go by 2 feet per turn for both. I don’t often fish at depths beyond 20 feet so it’s a pretty quick and easy way to check the depth.
If I drill multiple holes, trying to find the drop off point of some structure, I can check the depth of each hole in 30 seconds or less.
