An Every Day Ice Fishing Adventure

February 9, 2009 by admin

Our Outdoors
Nick Simonson

When you go off the beaten path during the winter, you never know what you're getting into

My brother and I set off a couple weeks ago to fish a local lake for perch. I had forgone a trip to Minneapolis due to the impending bad weather and figured we could kill some time before it arrived with some pre-frontal fishing, often recognized to be the best.

We arrived at the 40-acre reservoir in hopes of finding some less-finicky green and gold football sized perch than we had encountered at early ice.

As we veered off the main trail and headed down the path less traveled, the pavement disappeared abruptly under compacted snowmobile tracks. Winding our way on the hills above the lake we looked for signs of recent vehicle travel – there was none. Only the criss-crossing sled treads provided guidance as to where the road should be.

Blazing a path to the last valley before the usual on-and-off point for ice anglers on this small body of water, we stopped. There was no more road. Even the snowmobiles had jumped off the path and headed up into the small drainage valley.

“We can walk down this hill,” I said to my brother, as big flakes of snow began to fall on the windshield.

He agreed, and we loaded the Fish Trap with all of our ice fishing equipment, wedging the auger between the two seats. We stumbled, slid and let gravity do most of the work on the sled house as we made our way to the ice; the snow falling stronger and thicker than before.

We began punching holes over 20 feet of water in a prime point-meets-creek-channel-meets-main-basin area. Some blips showed up on the Vexilar in the first couple of holes and we set up shop. Downsizing to a tiny Genz Worm and a piece of Berkley Power Maggot, I began tempting bites on my spring bobber rod.

My brother, first to hook up, hollered that he had one on, and brought it up, all four inches of a horizontal striped largemouth bass; hardly the 12-inch vertical striped perch we were looking for. I wiped a quarter-inch of fresh snow from the display and dials on my FL-20 and decided to set up the cover on the portable shack.

When the jumbo perch are biting it's easy to overlook the weather

My brother and I settled in and tried to draw more strikes from the red lines that hugged the bottom of the fishfinder’s screen. As we listened to the patter of the gigantic snowflakes on the tarp I managed to ice one bass, the twin brother of the first one. Looking out the mesh window of the sled, my brother voiced concern over the rapidly-decreasing visibility.

“Five more minutes, and we’ll go,” I replied, knowing what the phrase has meant to me historically in terms of fishing trips.

From that point, nothing else bit or even showed up on the three-color graph. We packed it up, looked back toward the truck on top of the nearby hill and considered a new path that was mostly devoid of knee-high grass, thorny shrubs and a 20 degree incline. We chose the old ice fishing landing site, and walked our way back to the truck. The walk was long, and a brutal reminder as to how out-of-shape I am, and the near white-out conditions did not help matters.

Safely at the truck, I expected the lights to be on and the battery dying, but I had enough foresight to prevent that mistake from happening again this season. An hour after we had left the vehicle, three fresh inches of snow were on top of it.

As the blind led the blind, I asked my brother where he thought the road out of the small wildlife area was, the main road now obscured in a blanket of white. He suggested we look for clumps of grass on the edges, and try to go back in the tire tracks we had made on the way in. At a crawl just fast enough to keep the tires turning in the freshly-fallen snow, we made our way out to the gravel road and then the now one-lane highway. From lake to house the trip took an hour where it normally takes about 25 minutes.

It was an every-day escapade, spurred by cabin fever, less-than-ideal conditions and two four-inch largemouth bass. It was stressful at times, hilarious at others, and most certainly a trip I will put up there on the shelf in my mind with some of the other winter adventures I’ve had…in our outdoors.