It's a sport that's done on ice, but you don't need a stick or skates, just a fishing rod and some bait. Ice fishing may not be as popular as lake fishing, but as our Andy Mattison tells us, it keeps the fishing industry in Oswego County busy year round.

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OSWEGO COUNTY, N.Y. -- When the pond freezes, they will come. If it's hard enough to drive a four wheeler over, it's ideal conditions for ice fishing. And in Oswego County, one of the hotspots is Sandy Pond.

"I like the ice conditions. Some places you go, you gotta worry about gas pockets and thin ice and stuff. This is pretty good up here," said Palermo resident Bob Munger.

The sport also helps keep the local tackle shops busy year round.

"This has helped out a lot. It's like another season for me that I didn't have before. It's really helped us with our income a lot. The bigger percentage is local, but we still have a lot of people come in from out of state for these tournaments they have," said Woody's Tackle Shop owner Dave Wood.

So what kind of fish do you catch while ice fishing? Well here on Sandy Pond it's smaller fish like perch and sunfish. But on a rare occasion, somebody might catch a steelhead or northern pike.

"Instead of taking home one salmon, they'll take home 20 of 30 perch, whatever happens to be limit for that day for that species or half a dozen walleyes, whatever they happen to be fishing for or whatever happens to be biting," said Oswego County Tourism Director Dave Turner.

It seems almost every weekend there's an ice fishing derby out on Sandy Pond. Ice fishing may not draw as many people from out of state as salmon fishing does, but it's rare to find the pond empty.

"On a good weekend, it can be thousands, maybe a thousand. That's a lot of people for one pond it's a lot of people," said Wood.

"Fishing is year-round. It depends on the species, your own interest, but its 12 months out of the year and we're fortunate because a lot of places tourism is based only on one season. We're fortunate that fishing carries a lot of our communities throughout the whole year," said Turner.

And it has certainly been feeding the tourism sector of Oswego County for quite some time.