The warm trend kept up this winter, but it stayed cold enough to keep ice. We never had more than 5-inches around here. Easy on the auger, hard on my mom and the other people who worry about me. I did find myself extra cautious. I rarely went without my spikes hanging from my neck and even hung a boat cushion off of my shoulder on the last day of my season. My kids always wore their life vests, at least until we'd covered a lot of water and drilled a lot of holes to determine that it was safe.
This will by no means go down as my best year ever as far as the fish go. I had my share of mishaps, too. I got wet again trying to make it over the shore ice at the end of my last day out, leaving everyone exasperated by my stubborn drive to fish. No new records. Caught a few more nice pike, but flags were few and far between. Never seen the panfish so skiddish and lock-jawed. Could hardly find the perch and never found an active school of nice hungry jumbos like in years past. I think the strange weather probably screwed things up under the ice. I don't want to think that the lake is out of monster pike and pig perch. I'm actually sure it's not. The fishing pressure is next to nothing and I am quite certain that nobody is taking either out of there in any kind of numbers.
Though it wasn't the year I was drooling about in December, I found every trip to the ice purely enjoyable. It's that "never more alive" thing (which is ironic because my family was sure that ice fishing was going to result in my death). Losing myself in that wide open is intoxicating. Searching and tweaking and adjusting until I solve the puzzle and find the active fish puts me in a euphoric state of mind. Knowing that a flag could pop at any time and I could go into battle with a 40+ inch pike is just good stuff. I'm happy out there. I'm happy otherwise, but having a passion that exudes from your bones is the cherry on top of a good life. I can be objective and understand why someone would say, "It's just fish, get over it." I don't know why they get my serotonin flowing, but man they do, and I thank God that he made this part of who I am. If it isn't too late and you're not already muttering "freak," I should digress and highlight some of the good and some of the bad.
I took a Friday off to hit the ice alone in early February or so. I wasn't intending on bringing Lincoln, but when it was time to drop him off at preschool/daycare it dawned on me that this was a great opportunity to spend a day just him and me. He was thrilled with the idea, so I suited him up and headed north. Lincoln is barely four, so he can pretty much drive you crazy at any given moment. For example, the process of getting him dressed usually involves him walking to 3 different rooms, wrestling with the dog, playing with 7 different toys, 2 arguments with his brother, a story about why he loves his mom so much, and getting hurt and screaming like he's just been scalped alive and the open wound is being soaked in salty lemon juice. All the while I'm standing there with his shirt in my hands and have called his name so many times the dog has started coming to it.
ADHD Lincoln didn't show up to the ice that day. After a bit of searching, we found an active school of gills. I sat the boy down on a junior sized bucket, gave him a fishing pole, and let him go to work. No ADD medication has ever worked like this. He was on his game. He sat just as quiet and still as one of those British guards with the tall fuzzy black hats. He listened intently to my instructions and jigged with the precision of a grizzled veteran. He was in the zone and he stayed in the zone.
I haven't been able to break him of his mama's boy thing, and let me tell you it's incessant and extreme, so you can bet I was thumping my chest in man pride. Daddy's little fisherman. He now announces to Hayden and Luke that he still loves his mom, but he loved his dad that day he took him ice fishing. Then he says, "Right, Dad?" like it's just normal and everything's cool. Small victories towards the greater battle, I guess. Anyway, Linc pulled a couple through but was having a hard time getting the timing down on setting the hook. Pretty soon I became the hooker and he became the reeler inner. In his world, the reeler inner gets the credit for the fish. He also tells everyone that he was a better fisherman than Dad that day. I'll give him that one if it will keep the passion alive.
All of a sudden, I'm remembering the exact date of that trip. It was February 10. You know how I know that? Because it was Luke's birthday and we were several hours late getting home. After Lincoln had caught several gills, he got hungry. We ran to McDonald's to get some food to eat in the shanty. A pretty good snow storm had kicked up and Lincoln had started talking about being cold. His eyes were getting heavy and I saw him sneak a few yawns. The light bulb appeared above my head. Lincoln taking a nap=uninterupted fishing time for Dad. I should also add here that I had recetly lost my cell phone and forgot to bring my watch that day. Why this is an important detail will make sense later.
I turned on the heater in the shanty and grabbed a couple of boat cushions for Linc to sleep on. He knocked out almost before I could back out and zip up the flap. When he woke up, I remember being a little disappointed that he had taken such a short one. In reality, he had been asleep for over 2 hours. He had also started the nap later than normal. My fish brain doesn't have room for all of those details. It also didn't have room for how long it takes to break everything down in a snow storm and then drive home in said snow storm.
Let's see if you're with me. Luke's birthday. Mom is hoping to go out for dinner and then do presents and cake. Dad is on the ice with Mom's baby in the middle of a blizzard. Mom has no way to contact Dad. Dad's fish brain doesn't tell him that he should contact Mom. Dad is several hours late. Whose head do you think is about to explode? I won't tell you, also, that I started up the Jeep and put Lincoln in there so that he could be warm while I packed up. I apparently took so long that he developed the urge to pee, held it as long as he could, and then finally gave up and let lose all over his 2 layers of pants, his snow pants, his socks and boots, and the car seat. Still haven't learned that "don't give Gatorade to your kids when you take them ice fishing" lesson (see Sophomore Blues entry).
Michelle could have let me have it way more than she did when I got home. She was pretty understanding or at least had calmed down by then. I should add that Luke's real birthday party was the next day and I was every mom's dream as a birthday party thrower assistant. I even stood on a chair holding a pinata so that 6 year old boys could swing a two inch thick wooden dowel at my knees. Yeah, I've seen the America's Funniest Home Videos clips. I knew what was at risk. I wanted to be able to fish again with my wife's blessing, so if it meant taking a wild shot to the knee cap, bring it on.
In my head, that story was in the "good" category. I guess I forgot about the whole ruining Luke's birthday thing. That picture that I have in my head of Lincoln, the dialed in fishing master, must have blocked it out.
Yeah, it must have. Because I screwed up in an all too similar fashion later that same month. This time with Hayden. My trying to figure out the fish thing takes place at home probably more so than on the ice. I read everything I can on the internet, including forums. I stumbled across a few different threads about how dead smelt is the bait to use if you want to catch the kind of pike that give small children nightmares. As soon as I read that, my mission in life became getting my hands on some smelt. I started by looking into frozen smelt but the only way that I could get them was ordering them, and the shipping was through the roof. Then I discoved that they have them in Gull Lake and it's quite a big deal for guys to go out and catch them. My new mission became finding out everything I could about ice fishing for smelt, and to troll the forum for any information about how it was going on Gull Lake this year.
Luke and I had a pretty good initial scouting trip, with the exception of finding the lake 90% open water when we got down there. People were helpful and we found where there were two small bays at the south end that had good ice. We got there early enough to try for some pike and for Luke to skate. No flags and Luke face planted and got a bloody nose. Why are my good trips coming off smelling less than rosy? He was okay and still in the game, so we joined the little shanty town that was starting to grow over in the second bay. Once in the shanty, Luke was content to eat beef jerky and potato chips while I tried to figure out how to catch the pike candy. The schools showed up right away and I got all kinds of bites. What I didn't have was the knack for hooking them. Got about 100 bites. Caught 4.
It could only get better from there, so the very next week I asked Hayden if she wanted to come with me to try it again. I promised her ice skating and non-stop action on the fishing pole. We were both pretty excited about it. What I didn't factor in was that I had taken a half day off of work when Luke and I had gone. I worked a full day before Hayden and I headed down. Made it tough to get down there with any kind of daylight left. It also started sprinkling the minute we exited the expressway. The sprinkles turned into a full blown rain shower by the time that we got to the lake. When that voice inside my head (logic, reason, sound judgment) tells me I better go home, I answer it with, "I'm here. I'm gonna fish." We were there, so we were gonna fish.
I apologized to Hayden that she wasn't going to get to skate, but promised that it would still be fun. I asked if she wanted to wait in the car until I got the shanty up. She said she wanted to stay with me. I put my extra coat on her so that she could stay dry and we trudged our way out to Smelt-ville. I picked a spot and started to set up, but our would be neighbors came out of their shanty smoking, drinking, and cursing. Probably not the best atmosphere for a daddy-daughter moment, so we moved to the other side of shanty town.
Once we were set up, Hayden got busy on the snacks. I tried to find the fish. They showed up immediately just a week before. That night, there was barely a trace. No schools, just individual fish here and there. I dropped my bait above the first fish and it went screaming away like its tail was on fire. Uh-oh. Tried another one. Same reaction. Went like that all night and not one full school showed up.
In the mean time, Hayden was done with the snacks and had figured out pretty quick that the fishing wasn't worth her time. In a small shanty full of equipment, chairs, and a red hot lantern, she was all over the place. She squeezed behind me because she wanted to see what was in the bag in the tight place between my chair and the wall, she cut it close with the lantern a couple of times, she dropped my braid cutting scissors down the hole, broke the scoop off of my ladle trying to dig a swimming pool for the minnows, kept trying to wander outside . . . I wasn't getting much fishing done. She finally put some minnows in their new pool and named them all. This kept her busy for a little while. Not that I was able to catch anything anyway.
I started feeling bad about dragging her out there. Of course I had envisioned her skating to her heart's content with a bright orange sun setting in the sky behind her and then pulling up fish after fish, and enjoying every minute of it. A cloud of dread formed around me as I thought about her standing in the cold dark rain while I took down the shanty and tried to fit everything back in the sled. It got a little darker when she said that she was cold and hungry. I got the coat back on her and got to work. She was a trooper. If she was miserable, and I'm sure she was, she never said it. She actually helped me pack up and stayed tough as we sloshed back to the Jeep in rain that must have been a half a degree above freezing.
Between the drive, unloading everything on the sled, walking out, setting up, taking down, walking back to the Jeep, loading everything again, and driving back home, that trip takes forever. I got Hayden home at around 10:30 on a school night. To make things worse, the evil dog was asleep with Michelle and went ballistic when the garage door went up. Understandably, she was less understanding this time.
That trip was kind of the beginning of the end. The fish got really tough to catch on my home lake. I'd find them and they'd take a good long look at my bait, but they just weren't eating. Sometimes they'd sit on it for minutes at a time without so much as a taste. I'd still catch them, but one or two at a hole and they'd shut down or move on. Flags became almost nonexistent. I'd go whole days with one or two flags and it became common to pull in a roughed up minnow.
My enthusiasm unwavering, I told Michelle that all I wanted for my birthday is 2 days of complete ice fishing indulgence. She granted me my wish, so I was up at 5:00 on the morning of my birthday and on the ice before the sun was up. My dad called to ask about the ice and to say that he and my mom were worried about me. The first thing that I had done when I got out there was measure the ice. It was ugly on top, but it was 4-5 inches thick and there was still some good, solid, clear ice under the junk. I told him that I had a boat cushion on a rope around my neck and my spikes. He didn't seem too reassured. I've always wanted to please my parents, and the day I turned 38 I started getting a nagging feeling in the pit of my gut that they were none too pleased.
I caught a 40-inch muskie on my birthday last year. I thought of it as God's little present for me. He must not have been too happy with me either, because no such present waited for me this year. I had a typical day of late. Caught a few here and there, but only if I moved a lot. A few flags, but they kept dropping the minnow. Caught one small bass on a creek chub. In the evening, I put my shanty up over 40 feet of water to fish for crappies. Someone who lives on the lake felt compelled to yell out and ask me how thick the ice was. He was using his "You're an idiot" tone. This was the thickest ice on the whole lake, so I felt okay.
The crappies didn't disappoint. There was a distinct school just off the bottom and another suspended in the upper half. When I dropped my jig to the lower school, the screen would fill from top to bottom as the fish crawled out of the woodwork to investigate. I used a glowing Ratso tipped with a minnow and they found it to be delicious. I used a second dead-stick rod with a minnow on a bare hook. I had to give it up because I couldn't keep up with both rods. Pulling fish out of 40 feet of water is a death sentence for them. The pressure change blows up their swim bladders and causes their eyes to pop out of their heads. I kept them for a couple of fish eaters at work.
My dad called in the middle of the maylay to suggest that I sit in front of the fire and watch some TV with him. This meant that my mom was still worried. Oh man. Chasing these crappies was probably what I had been looking forward to most since I had a hunch that they'd be aggressive when the rest of the fish in the lake were not. They were living up to my expectations and then some. Guilt for making my mom worry and knowing how concerned everybody else was made me finally start to wonder if I should be concerned. I decided that I had pushed my luck far enough. I abandoned the hundreds of active fish, broke camp, and headed back to the dock to drop off my shanty and other things before getting my tip-ups.
When I approached the dock, I noticed a little more water around it and that the water was starting to creep on top of the ice. I made it on the dock as dry as a bone, but still had my tip-ups on the ice behind me. I put my spotlight on them and found that I had a flag up. I tested the ice and it moved a little, but it had just held me. I tentatively put my weight back on it, but no sooner did I let go of the dock when the ice caved in around me. It's only waste deep there and I scrambled out quickly. I wasn't cold, just wet. Wet and stupid.
I was supposed to sleep at my parents' that night because they live close by and I had planned to head right back out in the morning. I sat out there in the dark in my wet pants and boots, phone in hand, for several minutes before calling them. This whole fishing thing for me, although annoying to everyone because it's about all I talk about, is considered overall by my family to be good and healthy. By making everyone worry and then proving them right by falling through, I felt that I had tainted that. I know that I carry my obsession too far at times, but it's usually pretty harmless. This was one of those times when I was purely selfish and hurtful to those around me. After screwing up Luke's birthday and keeping Hayden out in the cold until 10:30 in the rain and dark, I was beginning to recognize a theme.
When I tell that voice, "I'm here, I'm gonna fish" there's usually more to it. I stifle it to keep it from becoming a full conscious thought, but it's there. I'm here, I'm gonna fish . . . even if Michelle gets frustrated because it's my third night away this week, and she's been saying she'd like some time with me . . . even if my mom and mother-in-law are worried sick about my safety . . . even if I haven't seen my kids much lately and should get home to help put them to bed . . . even if I have a million things to take care of at home that should have been done 2 weeks ago . . . even if I'm dragging my kid out for the millionth time and they just want to be home . . .
I'm blessed to have a passion. It's brought me endless joy. I have the opportunity to share it with my kids and others around me. What I'm just starting to learn is that I have to get a handle on managing it. Find the brakes. I don't think I have any right now and didn't think I needed them until I fell through after ignoring countless warnings. God thumped me on the head that night. Got me good with one knuckle. He could have used a sledge hammer. I could have gone through in 40 feet of water in the pitch dark, without a single soul around to drag me back out. I better start listening before he reaches for something with a little more heft. I better wrap it up before I'm belly up. More practically, I better learn a different answer to that little voice when it tells me that it's time to go home. If I don't, I might not end up belly up, but the good graces of those that are important to me will be belly up, bloated in the hot sun, and floating amongst trash and dirty foam in stagnant brown backwaters. Put the fishing pole down, Matt. Put . . . the fishing pole . . . DOWN!
