Good job, dude! I've been hesitant to try this year, but may try to join you briefly on Wednesday.
As a lesson to us all, let me recount a failure in my own thinking I just noticed. I had given up on mealworms for most of my icefishing long ago. I have heard good things about the "giant" ones at Strawberry, sometimes, and when I started icefishing, I bought them a lot. Mealworms were cheaper, every store had them, and the rumor was that fish wouldn't much bite regular earthworms much through the ice.
However, my first dozen trips out or so, they seemed to perform very poorly on Pineview perch and Mantua bluegills compared to both spikes and waxworms. When I found and bought some waxies, my success jumped. I stopped buying mealies almost entirely. Last few times I bought mealworms was because they were out of everything else. I once bought CRICKETS over mealworms at the pet store due to my lack of faith in them. (Side note; bluegills at Mantua seem to distrust crickets through the ice.)
Over the years, I went back to regular earthworms (nightcrawlers, etc.) for some situations, esp. trout, perch, and LMB at Mantua. But, now here
YOU are telling me that I was wrong all along about crappies and mealworms. [shocked][

] I have caught crappies up there tipped with waxworms, spikes, perch eyes, perch strips, chub chunks, Crappie Nuggets, Gulp Minnows, Gulp Maggots, red worms, soldier-fly grubs, and grass shrimp. I must be an idiot, but it never even occurred to me that mealies might outfish any or all of those on a given day.
Let that be a lesson to me.
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