When I was in high school, my buddies and I would set out a spread of tip-ups and then just wait for a flag while cooking brats or tossing around a football. It was super simple. And often very ...

To many in the “hardcore” ice crowd, tip-up fishing is a joke. It’s for meat fishermen only. It’s for lazy people. Well, I say that seeing a flag pop up is the hard-water equivalent of ...

According to Ben Scherg, inventor of the Hook-Set Tip-Up, there's a key problem with that time-honored system: Too often, he says, a fish that trips the flag is gone by the time the angler gets to ...

Traditional tip-ups typically store heavy dacron line on a built-in spool, and when a fish strikes, it trips a flag allowing line to tear freely off the spool as the fish swims off with the bait.

That means ice fishers must carefully monitor their lines, by eye, with a tip-up flag, or with a rattle-type reel that loudly announces a strike. Attentiveness is key in hauling fish from beneat ...