Fish Tales: Let a friend drag you out on the ice this season

by Bill Eden

Jan 02, 2008

This is the time of year that drags for me. We have already put all the boats away and there is ice around all the boat launches. Even if we wanted to go out on the small lakes, we would need an ice breaker to reach the open water. Years ago, we would have done just that. But now that I am getting older, the water is colder to the touch and the cold air seeps through my snow suit a lot faster.

It was not that many years ago that we thought nothing of launching the car topper off a snow covered beach to go duck hunting or fishing. It was only two years ago that Jim and I though we would use a canoe to set a bunch of beaver traps along the shore of a lake. We paddled close to half a mile over to the other side of this lake and started to set up shop. It took us all afternoon. By the time we got back to the truck, the sun was setting. But it had been a wonderful bluebird day.

Our problems started the next morning. Overnight the lake had frozen over from shore to shore. There was not a chance that we could walk around and retrieve our traps or whatever we had caught during the night. So we each took up a chunk of tree limb or old length of 2x4 lumber and commenced to bash a trail out across the lake. It wasn’t long before we were both soaking wet from splashing each other, and we were sweating buckets. This was going to be our one and only trip like this, so we picked up each set as we went along — and whatever we had in it. By the time we made our round, the canoe was so full of stuff that we were down to only two inches of free board. The trail we made coming out was also starting too freeze up again. There were a few times on the way back that we ground to a stop; where we had to back up and make another run at the ice. But at no time were we ever cold in any way. In fact it was just good fun.

This fall I got a phone call from my old buddy Ron. He lives to fish for trout. We would walk into some backwoods lake that was quite literally miles away from the nearest road and if we got the least bit cool, we would grab up the hand auger and start to cut a few more fishing holes along the shore of the lake. But now he tells me that he hardly even went fishing last year and tt has been years since he went ice fishing. Seems he gets cold now and hates to get his hands into the cold water. He is only seven years older than I am.

Is this how things go? You get a bit older and you start to find reasons why you do not go out in the cold anymore? Maybe it is like hearing loss, it starts so gradually that you never notice your hearing is gone until someone points it out to you.

Maybe that is what your friends are for, they drag you along, out in the cold. They make you sit on a plastic bucket, out on a wind-swept frozen lake. They are the ones that get their truck stuck in the snow and slush so you get to shovel them out. But by the end of the day, you find out that you had a great time, that no one even noticed the cold and that you you all discovered the old spark was still there.

Perhaps we are only truly as old as we feel. If that is the case, we have less than a month till the kick off for ice season. It’s time to get out the old fishing box and plan for the next six months of ice and cold fingers.