A day ice fishing is quite a rush

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, January 15, 2008

With nothing on the reel but light-weight, stranded-filament line, I watched down through the large spearing hole in the ice inside the dark fish house as a truly large northern slid into view from the far side of the hole. In fact, if there is an even better word than “slid” to describe how he came into view, I don’t have it.

Really, there are no words quite up to the task of describing how large fish seem to undulate ever so slightly as they glide in and out of view down there. For those of you who have not had the privilege — for it truly is a privilege — of watching that world down there through large holes cut in the ice, you are missing a spectacular sight.

It’s lit up down there during even the cloudy daytime like there are diffused spot lights. The snow on top of the ice somehow blends daylight right on through, so that if the water has any clarity at all, everything down there has an other-worldly glow, a kind of full-moon fluorescence.

This year it’s especially easy to see down there, because the early snow blocked the suns rays from directly penetrating the ice, there has been practically no weed growth, no algae growth — both factors that tend to make visibility down there impossible.

As we were leaving the ice the other day, we briefly talked to a young man who wanted to tell us how many fish there were down there in his Aqua-View, an electronic lens that transmits up to a small screen, just like a television set.

There’s news for him — you don’t need an Aqua-View; you just need a dark house over the hole, and maybe a bigger hole. Yes, there are a lot of fish down there.

They live there, you know.

Just like the northern who was eying my hook with a small minnow on it. The hook was about one-third of an inch long. The minnow on it was about an inch and a half long. The northern was all of 25 or 26 inches long, which is nearly three times as long as the dinky little ice fishing rod I held in my hands.

At least there was a fish eying my minnow. We’ve been up, down, and all around ever since Christmas, and generally speaking, the fishing has been problematic.

First, because the snow coated the ice early in December, the ice refused to freeze thick enough for vehicles to drive on it safely. Thus it was on a day about two-thirds of the way into December that two of us decided to pull the rather large portable fish house out onto Ottertail Lake.

Before we took off pulling it, I eyed the house on its sled. Piled up on top of the house was the gasoline-powered ice auger, a five-gallon pail with water and minnows in it, a shovel, lunch, gasoline for the auger, and a few more odds and ends. The snow was about six inches deep. Off we went.

Five minutes later, our coats were on the house we were pulling, too. It was about a quarter of a mile out to where we needed to be, and halfway there I was of a mind to say something like: “Hey. I bet the fish will bite right here. What do you say?”

I stifled it. Wimp. Sissy. Weakling. I kept on pulling. Now we were pulling in not only snow but water.

“Where’s this water coming from?” I asked my friend, who grew up fishing these lakes, summer and winter.

“Oh, that’s coming up from the holes people are drilling in the ice, because the snow is so heavy,” he off-handedly replied.

What? The ice is sinking?

Oh, well, just a little, it turned out.

We got out there, drilled a couple of holes, and sat the tent in four inches of water. Not fun.

Next, it got real cold later in the month, that ice froze and turned so rough you could barely walk.

It hasn’t been the greatest ice fishing so far this season.

The northern sucked that minnow down, and was leaving the hole in the direction underneath me. I unscrewed the drag on the reel (too little, too late, people), set the hook, and for a moment, nothing happened. Next thing you know, a northern rocket shot back across the hole, and the pole came up against the drag.

I had time to notice that the tip of the pole was bent almost all the way back to the reel when the rod broke right in half, and took off down through the ice. I grabbed the line, felt the fish tug once really hard, and then it was over.

What a rush!

You should try it, but if you catch a big Northern with a little hook in his mouth ... IT’S MINE.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.