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Into the ice |
When Mark Armstrong finished putting up the tentlike ice-fishing shelter, he left me to thaw out in its relatively toasty confines while he shuffled over the ice, seemingly without purpose, toward a rocky point closer to the shoreline of Elevenmile Reservoir. The early morning sky was dazzlingly blue. There was no wind. It was all very pretty, but the air temperature was five degrees below zero.
I misinterpreted Armstrong's bequeathment of the small shelter as an entirely noble gesture. I assumed he was worried about the wimpy outdoor writer coming down with a case of cold feet (not to mention ears, fingers, nose, and other assorted frozen body parts, some of them very personal and prone to shrinkage).
The shelter was out in about forty feet of water, a good fifty yards from shore. It was a spot where we expected, sometime during the morning, to find rainbow trout and kokanee salmon suspended at fifteen to twenty feet, which is the depth Armstrong calculated for the plankton level. As it turned out later, his calculation was correct. We were to catch several fish of both species under precisely that scenario.
Into the Ice
But for now, Armstrong, a maker of ice rods, reels, and jigs who is generally recognized as the modern-day guru of Colorado ice fishing (the word is overworked, but it does fit), knew something I didn't. Although it was late February and still very much winter in the vast, stark mountain basin known as South Park, big rainbow trout were already moving toward the shallower water of small, rock- and gravel-bottomed bays in search of spawning territory. Early in the spawning season, they prowl these areas at first light, but retreat to deeper haunts when the sun is high.
Just about the time I was summoning sympathy for my exposed-to-the-elements partner and thinking to wax expansive and invite him inside with me, I heard him yell. I stiffly lurched outside onto the snow-covered, twenty-six-inch-thick ice with camera in hand—the abominable ice man with a Nikon. Armstrong was hunched over a hole, his light, whippy glass ice rod bent double and violently bouncing toward the water in the hole like a divining rod.
This, Mark said, his panting breath sending a cloud of vapor into the air, is a hell of a trout.
So it was. When he finally threw frostbite caution to the wind and thrust his hand down into the water of the hole, he hoisted out a ten-pound male rainbow that was the most gorgeously colored lake rainbow I had ever seen. A 1/32-ounce, chartreuse, chenille-body-and-marabou-tail jig was lodged solidly in the corner of its prominent jaw. The give-and-take fight on four-pound-test line had lasted at least ten minutes.
The ten minutes had been long enough to freeze the shutter of my camera. I punched frantically at the shutter button and was rewarded with a low, grinding noise. Sometimes our gadgetry is as much at the mercy of the elements as we are—which is sort of reassuring, in a way.
© Article copyright Pruett Publishing
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