2016 Nov 5^th

As promised, no politics today. Today is a piece about ice fishing. (How’s that for a segue?) This is from “And Yet Again,” a collection of short essays I did five years ago. It is available on Amazon and in your local bookstore: enjoy!

Ice Fishing

Winter in northern Michigan lasts and lasts. Fortunately, there are many delightful outdoor activities. One of these with appeal for some hardy folks is ice fishing. No, you aren’t fishing for ice, you are fishing on ice. Make sure the ice is at least three or four inches thick so you stay on top of the ice. Staying on top of the ice is very important; finding yourself under the ice can ruin your day and that of your relatives as well, particularly if you are under-insured.

This winter sport is so popular that Houghton Lake, a huge inland lake in northern Lower Michigan has an ice fishing festival called “Tip-up Town.” (A tip-up is a small ice fishing rig I’ll write about later.) Many, many people come to Tip-up Town. The lake is dotted with fishermen and women, all with their plastic buckets and canvas wind screens. This festival has moved well beyond ice fishing: There are hayrides, snowmobile races, dog sled races, and a polar bear swim. The most popular “event” is the beer tent; it is well known that winter dehydrates people and makes them thirsty.

A spectator sport not mentioned in the festival’s brochure is watching the occasional car or truck drop through the ice. Drivers, apparently thinking that there is safety in numbers, tend to drive their vehicles toward other vehicles already on the ice. This can be unwise. Sometimes one hears a series of cracking sounds. The ice buckles and slowly the front end of the truck sinks into the lake. Most drivers are aware of this possibility and take appropriate precautions. They don’t keep their trucks off the ice; they drive with the truck door open so if the worst happens they can jump out immediately. If the rear of the truck is above the ice, a tow truck can extricate the vehicle. If the vehicle has sunk to the lake bottom the owner must wait for spring to retrieve it and will face considerable expense. Spring sales of used trucks draw very skeptical buyers in this part of Michigan. The beer tent plays an important role here, but whether as cause or effect is unclear.

Let’s assume you are a beginner and will be fishing a local lake. Begin by acquiring a white, five-gallon plastic bucket. All ice fishermen have one of these. You keep your gear in it and you sit on it during the interminable periods when you are not doing anything but waiting interminably. You also need an ice spud, or an ice augur. The ice spud is a heavy iron bar about five feet long with a sharpened chisel on one end. You will use this to chip a hole in the ice. If you have a gasoline powered ice augur this chore will be much easier, but this sucker is heavy and you had best get a sled to pull it and the rest of your stuff to the best spots on the ice. You can tell the best spots by noting where the other ice fishermen are. Locate yourself about in the middle of the group and spud your first hole. Pay no attention to the hostility coming from the other fishermen. They may have run out of schnapps.

Once your hole has been spudded, put your tip-up in place. A tip-up is a wooden crosspiece that rests on the ice above the hole. A third wooden arm, vertical to this cross piece and containing a spool of line goes into the water.  A wire leader at the line terminates in a hook impaling a small helpless minnow. The vertical stem has a long metal spring with a red flag atop it. This is bent and attached to the reel so that if anything grabs that minnow and swims away with it the spring will be released and the flag will pop up; thus the tip-up. All you have to do is run over to the tip-up, and pull in the line and the likely undersized pike attached thereto. Make sure you have pliers to remove the hook from the pike lest its teeth remove skin from your fingers. Once the pike has been returned to the water, you reach into your minnow pail, retrieve another minnow and try your luck again. Your hands are now numb with cold so you unzip your jacket and slide your hands up under your armpits to warm them up thus transferring some of the fish slime from your hands to your shirt. Not to worry, your wife will probably move laundry day up a bit.

After sitting on your white pail for about an hour with no action you decide to move a short distance away and spud another hole. The law allows you to have several lines in the water at one time. You decide to jig for perch. Other fishermen have been pulling in perch. Fishing for perch is done differently. You have a small two-foot-long rod with very light monofilament line attached to a spinning reel. At the end of the line you have a tiny weighted pearl colored lure. You drop this in the water and let it go down about twenty feet. Now you bounce the rod tip up and down, just enough to keep the lure moving. If a perch takes the lure it will be barely noticeable and you must set the hook immediately. This is unlike the tip-up where the pike must be allowed to run with the bait before you set the hook.

Time passes, the sun is very low, almost on the horizon it is nearly four in the afternoon and the temperature is falling. You have taken off your gloves because it is hard to feel a perch taking the bait through gloved fingers. It is also hard with fingers numb from cold. Time for schnapps; several healthy gulps trigger a massive acid reflux attack partially offset by the application of mint anti-acid. The schnapps does its work. You notice a nice warming of the hands as the blood flow to your extremities increases. You don’t notice the slight decline in your core temperature. Other fishermen are packing up and leaving. You check your tip-up and discover that the hole you spudded a few hours ago has frozen. You scoop the ice away with a device designed for that purpose.

Now back to the perch hole; you have a nibble, you strike and begin reeling in a nice perch. Suddenly the line tightens and begins to fly off your reel. Wow! Must be some perch. It isn’t a perch; a perch may have grabbed your lure but then a pike must have grabbed the perch. There isn’t much chance that you’ll land the critter. It grows in your imagination to at least ten pounds. When you are about out of line the pulling stops and you reel and reel and finally up through the hole comes your lure attached to the front half of a perch. It would have been a dandy catch. Once cleaned it might have gone all of an ounce and a half. You pack up and head back to your car. No one is left on the lake. Perhaps next time you’ll get a nice mess of perch, or a couple of legal pike.

 Once you get home your wife asks you how you did. “You certainly smell as if you’ve caught something.” she said. I know she doesn’t like fish so I replied, “Yes, I did. I got several pike but I know you don’t like their odor so I gave them away.” She smiled seductively and went to prepare my martini. I felt no shame.