I used to belong to a rod and gun club in Virginia. The club consists of almost 1,000 acres of land surrounding three 30 acre lakes. Before I quit, I was spending 4 to 5 weeks of the year out there.
Attached to the club is a Virginia fish hatchery. We let them use the water from our lakes for the hatchery, they maintained a healthy population of fish in the lakes. It's a nice trade off. The hatchery manager lives there year round. Basically, him and his family are the only ones on this 1,000 acres for the bulk of the winter.
The winters there are like November and December here. Relatively mild. The lakes never completely freeze over and during the real mild winters, the ice barely makes it out from shore for 50 feet or so.
During the winter months the hatchery manager goes fishing on the nicer days. That usually means hardly any wind. These lakes are electric trolling motors only and the bulk of the boats are flat backed canoes.
The manager ties on a deep diving crank bait and trolls around the lake at barely a walking pace. That's 3 mph for those that need the info. He'll methodically comb the whole lake, trolling the whole time.
The end result is some of the biggest largemouth bass of the year. The biggest taken out of the lakes was a few ounces over 14 pounds. He'll consistently catch bass in the 8 to 14 pound range all winter long.
I don't fish lakes or ponds in Illinois, I got spoiled by what I had and I hate shore fishing. I don't own a boat. I know I wrote about this and posted it many years ago, but I never hear of any reports of anyone trying it.
If anyone gives this a try, let me know if it works. I don't care about the water. Just curious if this will work till the coming of the ice age.