I’m less happy to report that our previous record, set two years ago, was one. One rainbow trout.

Half this year's catch. Top is a rainbow, I think. Bottom? Speckled?

Last winter we were skunked altogether, but that’s not quite as ignominious as it sounds, since a relatively warm winter provided precious few fishing days on our pond. Even so, I can report that sitting around all day, watching your tip-ups not tipping up, is demoralizing. Since that has been my general experience of ice fishing, though, I was prepared for it.

And we’ve seen a lot of that. Our friend Bob (whose wife, Suzie, caught the monster perch that elicited so much comment a few posts back) went so far as to say that, during the day, that’s what ice fishing is. The fish feed early in the morning and late in the evening. In between, there’s a lot of sitting around, watching your tip-ups not tipping up.

So, this year, we’re trying the novel strategy of trying to catch a fish when the fish are most amenable to being caught. We’re fishing overnight.

The tip-ups go out during the day, and we keep a close eye on them, but most days nothing happens until sunset, when we often get a flag or two. And maybe, if we’re lucky, a fish (they often get away with the bait). We keep watching them until we go to bed, but I don’t think trout feed much after dark.

The best part is the morning. Sunrise on Hamblin Pond, and a tipped-up tip-up. So far, we’ve had at least one flag every morning we’ve left tip-ups out. Although killing and gutting a trout before coffee isn’t my first choice, I’d rather kill and gut a tour before coffee and have a trout than not kill and gut a trout before coffee and not have a trout.

That's a trout, about to come up through the hole.

Morning and evening, that’s when you catch trout.

So how do you explain the guys who were fishing just down the pond from us?

There were four of them, men who grew up on the Cape and had been ice fishing all their lives. As we were setting up our tip-ups, about mid-day, we watched one of them pull what looked like a huge fish up through the ice.

“I gotta see that fish,” I said to Kevin, and we went over to say hello and check out the fish.

Now, it’s possible that visiting your ice-fishing neighbors to get a good close look at their catch is bad form. If it is, I don’t want to know about it.

Luckily, they didn’t seem to mind.

“Nice fish!” I said, as we got close enough to see that it was, indeed, a beautiful brown trout, fat with roe.

The guy who caught it grinned and held it up for inspection. “It’s going in the hold over there,” he said, and headed over to where his friends and his gear were. We went along, and watched as he slipped the fish into a kind of live well they’d cut in the ice, where it joined two others.

I couldn’t decide which I was more impressed by, the fact that they’d caught three trout mid-day, or the clever well they were keeping them in.

Three brown trout in their icy live well

Our ice is about seven or eight inches thick, and they hollowed out a hole, about two feet by one foot, five or six inches deep – as deep as they could cut it without breaking through to the water. Then they punched a hole in the floor so the water filled the hole. Voila! Live well!

I was so taken with it that I asked them if I could take a picture, and went back to the house for my camera. When I got back, I ended up talking to them for quite a while about fishing, and growing mushrooms, and raising turkeys, and first-hand food in general.

And – get this – they gave me the brown trout! The big one! With the roe! They all seemed to like fishing more than actually eating fish. I said thank you and took her home.

The fish and the roe (which I brined) are in the refrigerator, waiting to become tomorrow’s dinner. And the tip-ups are out, so there may be another before morning.

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Maybe it’s because the days are getting longer, so I’m getting more sunshine. Maybe it’s because it’s about to be February, which means we’re only 28 days away from its being about to be spring. Maybe it’s because I’ve decided to throw economy to the wind and heat the house to a comfortable temperature.

But I think it’s the ice fishing.

Kevin, setting tip-ups

The common element in all winter activities is danger, which makes me a reluctant participant and Kevin a gung-ho advocate. For most sports, the danger comes from speed. Take a ski, or a sled, or a luge, or the vehicle of choice from my college days, a cafeteria tray, and combine it with a slippery trail that goes downhill, and you’ve got an accident complacently certain to happen.

Although Ice fishing has the virtue of not involving speed, it more than makes up for that by happening on ice through which you can fall to your death.

(The worst of winter activities, of course, involve speed on ice through which you can fall to your death. Our friend Rick has been making noises about going ice-boating, but I’m not sure I can work up the nerve. Kevin is ready to suit up at a moment’s notice.)

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t even think about ice fishing until I saw, with my own eyes, something very heavy safely traverse the ice on our pond. Something like a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or maybe a rhinoceros. Kevin, though, is dusting off the tip-ups as soon as the ripples stop.

This year, that was a few days ago.

What a prize! (And the fish looks good, too.)

Our pond, because it’s fairly big, is often late to the ice-fishing party. We’d already been to fish with our friends Bob and Suzie on their pond, on the red-letter day that Suzie caught a 1.8-pound perch. (In case you’re not quite sure what constitutes a big perch, that most certainly does.) And we’d been watching people ice fish on the other side of our pond, which froze first this year, for at least a week. But it wasn’t until this week that we could walk out on the ice from our property

As soon as we could, Kevin got out all our equipment. We’ve got five tip-ups, which are the gizmos you put over the holes you drill in the ice. They have a spool with fishing line, and a flag that pops up when a fish takes the line. We’ve a got a rope that we tie to a tree and bring out with us to the fishing grounds, so we have a lifeline in case of mishap. And we ought to have an augur, which is what you drill holes in the ice with, but all we have is an ice axe.

What we needed was bait. In the past, we’d used shiners, standard-issue bait fish you buy by the dozen from Amy at Sports Port. A shiner isn’t a kind of fish; it’s a size of fish. Just about any little, silvery fish can pass for a shiner, and I have no idea which actual species we’ve used in the past. The thing about shiners, though, is that our bait-to-catch ratio makes them expensive.

Bait!

This year, Kevin had a brilliant idea. He’d had a lot of success over the summer with a Mooselook bright orange spoon lure that looks a lot like a goldfish. So, why not try an actual, genuine goldfish? They’re seventeen cents a pop at the pet store.

We got ten.

It was only when we’d set up the tip-ups and I mentioned, online, that we were ice-fishing with goldfish that I got the first inkling that it might not be a good idea. Astute reader Al Cambronne, who hunts, fishes, and writes about the great Wisconsin outdoors, brought it to my attention that using goldfish as bait just might be … ahem … illegal.

I checked the Massachusetts regulations and found the list of fish approved for use as bait. It contains such evocatively named creatures as the creek chubsucker and the mummichog, but it most certainly does not contain goldfish.

The problem, of course, is that goldfish are carp, a notoriously adaptive species that can make themselves, and their bazillion offspring, at home in any body of water bigger than a birdbath. Let them loose in your trout pond at your peril.

We will not make this mistake again. And we hope that, having made it the first time, we haven’t set the wheels in motion for Hamblin Pond to be overrun with giant, man-eating carp. That’s a long shot, since we think all our fish either died on the hook or got eaten by trout, but still. I don’t want to find out what it feels like to be the idiot responsible for a robust population of an invasive species, and go down in history with the zebra mussel guy and the kudzu lady.

For the record, goldfish make lousy bait. Although the trout seem to like them, their little gold lips are too flimsy to stay in the hook as they’re being eaten. We had way too many false alarms – a popped flag, but no fish. We don’t think the goldfish simply escaped, since we only lost them when a flag went up, and they aren’t nearly big enough to turn the spool on their own. The wily trout ate them right off the hook, and had a tasty snack without paying with their lives.

We did hook two trout with our ten goldfish, but we lost one just as we were pulling it up. The other one, we landed safely, and it’s in our fridge now, ready to be dinner. Or a part of dinner, at any rate. It’s a pretty small fish.

But in the depths of winter, when there’s no lobstering or gardening, no mushrooms or bluefish, no deer, no ducks, and no pheasants, it means a lot that we still have the excitement of pulling one little rainbow trout up through a hole in the ice.

I’m sure glad I didn’t wait for the rhinoceros.

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A tip-up, not tipped up

Ice fishing is an activity in which you risk your life by venturing out on ice which may or may not be strong enough to bear your weight, hack at the ice right under your feet with an ax to make a hole, bait and set a gizmo called a tip-up, and sit outside in the cold watching the flag on the tip-up stubbornly refuse to tip up.

The flag is attached to a spool of fishing line, which is attached to a baited hook.  In theory, the flag will pop up when a fish takes the bait, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.  

People argue endlessly about whether, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, it really makes a noise, but everyone seems to agree that when you go ice fishing and there are no fish to tip up your tip-up, it’s still called ice fishing.

This activity shouldn’t be called ‘ice fishing.’ It should be called ‘freezing.’

Ice fishing is very strenuous

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Me and dinner, both very cold

 I never thought I’d be talked into an activity where the upside is dinner and the downside is drowning, or maybe hypothermia, but yesterday found me gingerly walking out on our frozen pond, ice fishing gear in hand.

Let me be clear from the get-go: this was my husband’s idea. From the morning, some time in November, when we woke up to find a thin skin of ice on the puddles in the driveway, he’s been waiting for the pond to freeze so we can go out there and freeze with it, jiggling a hook through a hole in an attempt to reel in a rainbow. The pond began to cooperate some time in the beginning of January, and each day Kevin walked a little farther out on it while I watched from shore, waiting for the crack and the splash.

As cold day followed cold day with no crack and no splash, I gained confidence, and one sunny afternoon we decided to walk the pond’s perimeter, a circuit of two or three miles. The east side of the pond, where we live, was reassuringly solid, but when we reached the north side the ice started shifting under us. The movement, accompanied by ominous groans, had me scurrying for shore.

“The water’s only knee-deep when you’re three feet from shore, you know,” Kevin said in his patient-husband voice.

I did know, but it was the idea of the thing.

I’m not normally a cringing, snivelling coward, but there’s something about the idea of falling through ice into freezing cold water that scares the bejeezus out of me. I took a deep breath and soldiered on.

Half-way round, we ran into two ice fishermen. They had several holes going, were burning wood in a barbecue to stay warm, and were, inexplicably, drinking beer. After we chatted with them for a while about technique, we went on our way.

“How can they be drinking beer when it’s 20 degrees out?” I asked Kevin.

“You’re supposed to drink beer when you ice fish,” he explained, “That’s part of the point.”

Oh.

There’s a public beach at the south end of the pond, and a father and son had come, apparently with the sole purpose of walking out on the ice. They went out what seemed perilously far, but looked unconcerned. I was beginning to get the sense that I was the only person on the Cape afraid of the ice.

Now I may be a cringing, sniveling coward, but I’m a reasonable cringing, sniveling coward. By the time we finished our circuit, I was ready to acknowledge that the ice was clearly safe some distance out, and I was determined to conquer my fear and try some ice fishing.We had the ice, and we had the will, but we didn’t have the gear. So we went to see Amy.

On Cape Cod, knowing fishing must be like being rich: you’re never sure why someone wants to be your friend. Whenever I talk to Amy, who runs our favorite bait and tackle joint, Sports Port, I get the sense that she thinks I’m being friendly and engaging because I’m trying to charm her out of everything she knows. Which, in a way, I suppose I am – but I’m not sure I could pull it off with someone I didn’t like.

Amy explained that, in winter, the fish hang out near the bottom, so you want your bait to hang out there too, and she showed us how to rig a tip-up so the shiner (the little fish we’re using to catch the bigger fish) stays where the trout are likely to be.

A tip-up, trout-ready

If you’ve never used a tip-up, it’s a gizmo that you lay across the hole you made in the ice, with a reel extending below and a flag on a spring above. When you set it, you tuck the flag under a bar that’s attached to an axle that has the the reel at the other end, and spins when the reel does. Fish takes bait, swims away, turns reel, which turns the bar which releases the flag which tells you you’ve got a live one.

But before you set it, you have to deal with that making-a-hole-in-the-ice part. I had imagined this was a delicate operation, performed with a precision tool designed to drill a hole with minimal disruption to the surrounding ice. The ice you’re standing on, that would be. There is such a tool. It’s called an auger. But we don’t have one, so we had to go to plan B, which involved an eight-pound maul. A maul is like the infertile offspring of a sledgehammer and an axe. It is not delicate or precise. It is designed to beat your chores into submission.

“Don’t worry,” said Kevin. “Everyone uses these.”

“Not those guys,” I said, with some trepidation, pointing across the ice at two guys who had what I strongly suspected was an auger.

Kevin waved his hand in dismissal. “Coupla sissies.”

At this point, I should tell you something about my husband. He’s a risk-taker by nature, a commodity trader by profession, and still in one piece by sheer luck. I have resigned myself to his participation in dangerous activities, but I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I participate with him. Mauling ice seemed to me to qualify as a dangerous activity, and even Kevin admitted it had a certain counterintuitive element.

In an effort to alleviate my obvious anxiety about the danger involved in the whole ice-fishing enterprise, Kevin had rigged up a safety system that consisted of a long rope tied to a tree. “You just tie it to your belt when you go out on the ice, and you’re covered, he explained.”

When we ventured out on the ice for the first time, maul in hand, I couldn’t help noticing that the rope wasn’t tied to anyone’s belt. When I brought this to Kevin’s attention, he said, “We don’t need it when we’re both out here. If I fall through just go get the rope.”

“And if we both fall through?”

“That won’t happen.”

I grabbed the end of the rope and out we went.

If you’ve ever been on or, more sensibly, around, ice-covered lakes, you know that they make a strange, creepy noise. It’s an eerie, echoing twang, as though either Zeus is flexing his cookie sheets or Shamu is very sick. If you are inclined to be afraid of the ice, it’s not helpful.

We went out about fifty feet, and Kevin started whacking away at the ice with the maul. Chips flew in all directions, and in moments we had a trout-sized hole. Nothing bad happened, and we set up the first of the three tip-ups we’d gotten from Amy. We went out a little farther, and I took the maul. In for a penny, in for a pound, I figured, and started whacking. Another trout hole, another tip-up. All told, we set three.

 
The existence of tip-ups makes all the difference in ice fishing. It means that, instead of sitting next to the hold jigging a line up and down, you can set it and retreat to more hospitable accommodations to watch for a flag. In the case of the ice fishermen (and they were all men, although I reserve the right to use “fishermen” as a gender-neutral term for anglers of both sexes) on our pond, that meant hanging out around the Smokey Joe. In our case, to the sneering disapproval of ice fishermen everywhere, it meant sitting in our living room.

You’ve heard of armchair travelers and armchair quarterbacks, but we like to think we’ve done them all one better by becoming armchair ice fishermen. Because hanging out on the ice in relative discomfort is supposed to be part of the experience, one could say that retiring to comfortable chairs in a house warmed by a roaring wood stove is unsportsmanlike. Although, if one has the opportunity to retire to those comfortable chairs, one is much more likely to say, could you hand me my slippers?

It’s almost embarrassing to tell you how exciting it was when that first flag went up. We saw it release, and we both pointed and yelled. “The flag’s up, the flag’s up!” It was kind of like a fire drill – we grabbed our boots and hats, and ran for the exit. We went down to the ice and raced out to the hole. Somehow, I wasn’t scared anymore.

We reeled in our line and found nothing. No trout, no bait. The wily fish had grabbed the shiner and made a break for it. We reset it and went back in the house.

After another half-hour of not catching anything and using the binoculars to watch the other ice fishermen not catch anything, we got another flag. Same excitement, same drill, and, this time, a beautiful 2-pound rainbow trout.

No drowning, no hypothermia. Dinner!

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