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Where the fish are |
Thoughtful? Scientific? Are these words that can actually be connected in the same sentence with ice fishing? Yes, they can, although many people still have serious misgivings about it.
I am reminded of the day when Don Murphy and I sat on our upended five-gallon paint buckets (an anti-technology fashion statement) and cranked fish after fish onto the ice of Denver's Cherry Creek Reservoir—plump yellow perch and hand-size crappies tightly schooled at slightly varying depths over a bottom hump. They responded to 1/64-ounce or smaller marabou-tail jigs dangled two to eight feet off bottom with short ice rods and three-pound-test monofilament line. An accidental tourist happened by—one of those people who treat cabin fever by walking out onto the ice to see what these nuts are up to with their buckets, sleds, and pygmy rods. This guy shuffled over to Murphy, stared down at the pile of fish next to the eight-inch-diameter hole, and said, Did you catch all those fish here? To which Murphy, with his dry Irish wit, replied, No, we brought them with us.
The poet, novelist, and angler Jim Harrison once dismissed ice fishing as the moronic sport. Maybe so. It's hard to explain the allure of this odd outdoor enterprise. You have to get into all sorts of esoteric stuff about pristine winter landscapes and the quiet of a snow-covered icecap—but I think at the core of it, there's an analogy to golf. In golf, the little white ball with dimples in it is the great equalizer. Starting out in the game, superbly conditioned young athletes can't score any lower than a fifty-year-old accountant with a potbelly and arthritic knees. The great equalizer in ice fishing is the ice. Nobody has the advantage because he owns a boat or a float tube or a $600 rod or a garage full of high-tech equipment, or even because he possesses an arcane ability to read the water. In ice fishing, there is nothing on the surface to read, unless it is a cluster of frozen-over holes left the day before by somebody who got into a concentration of fish. (Look at those cigarette butts—somebody must have spent some time here.)
So everybody sets out on equal footing, literally. This isn't to say that being equipped the right way, knowing the depths and configurations of the lake bottom, and understanding the tendencies of ice-bound fish don't count for something. It all counts for a lot to the Renaissance ice angler. Somebody who knows his stuff can walk out onto the ice with his plastic bucket, a $50 auger, a $20 glass rod that's shorter than his leg, a $30 reel, a $3.50 lake-bottom topo map, 30 yards of light mono line, a small box of jigs, maybe a little container of mealworms or maggots with which to tip the jigs, and a $5 ice skimmer, and catch more fish in a winter season than a summertime angler with $5,000 worth of tackle and a $30,000 boat.
© Article copyright Pruett Publishing
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