Breaking the Ice

Dipping my toes into the icy waters of winter fishing

Sunset on Lake Bemidji.

Last week was not the first time I’d ever gone ice fishing, but it might have been my fifth? All but one trip has been in Minnesota; the exception was an epic trout fishing day in California’s High Sierra where the ice was two feet thick and the air temperature in the 60s. So yeah, I really don’t know much about this whole hardwater fishing thing. But here are some first impressions.

This latest trip was up to Bemidji with my friends Jamie Carlson and Nate Pischke of “Shore Lunch with Nate P,” and yes, there will be an episode of his show featuring this trip. I’ll post it when it airs. unlike me, they are both veteran ice anglers.

My first and strongest impression of ice angling is how static it is. You drill a hole in the ice — it was nearly three feet deep on Lake Bemidji — and there you are. Stuck. I mean yes, you can drill as many holes as you like, but the same inertia that governs moving your decoys and shifting hiding spots in duck hunting applies here. Eh, the fish’ll come. Just wait. It’ll be fine. Or not.

Most people these days have maps of the bottoms of lakes, so they can kinda-sorta pinpoint where they want to drill those holes — so it’s not totally rando where you set up. Even so, I am so used to moving constantly while fishing, even if it’s just drifting, that this weird stasis got to me.

The only thing similar in my experience is when you anchor up over a reef or sunken ship in the ocean to fish that structure for bottom-dwelling fishes, like black seabass, rockfish, grouper or snapper. That works well, but even then you never, ever fish that wreck more than maybe an hour or two, tops.

I was also surprised at how much gear is involved with ice fishing.

OK, maybe not that surprised — after all, the outdoor industry is loaded with garage engineers driven to “fix” every inconvenience in every outdoor pursuit. But still: power augers, special rods and reels, electronic fish finders, glowing lures, specialized pop-up tents, etc. etc.

Nate notes that the ice democratizes a lake because you don’t need an expensive boat to get to the best spots. I like that idea, and it’s true, but you’ll still spend a fair chunk of change on gear if you buy all this stuff.

The very first time I fished through the ice was maybe 23 years ago, with my friend Chris Niskanen, on the lake behind his house. What we did there was drill a bunch of holes, dropped bait down and balanced the rods in what’s called a tip-up, which is basically a flag that tips up if you have a bite. This was kinda rad, because we could see all our red-flagged tip-ups from his porch. When one tipped up, we’d run out and check it. This felt like the net fishing I do in Alaska. We caught a nice pike that day, I remember, maybe six or seven pounds.

The most memorable ice fishing trip I ever took was also with Chris, again more than two decades ago. This time to Red Lake in northern Minnesota, where there had been an explosion of gigantic crappies, which had taken over the biological niche left open by a crash in the walleye population there.

It was a bonanza. A city of ice shacks on the ice, maybe a thousand people fishing day and night. Crappies of three, four, maybe even five pounds coming up all over. That rush is what I hold onto when I am fishing through the ice.

Drilling holes, so many holes…

There is something very special about catching a fish through a three-foot hole in the ice. You get sort of a “big reveal” when the fish appears at the bottom of the hole, and then there’s the fear it might pop off as it’s coming up. You’re tempted to plunge your arm down in there to get it, and sometimes you do it anyway. But afterwards, you are a sad camper with a soaked, freezing arm — albeit one with dinner in a bucket.

As the hours passed with Nate, Jamie, a biologist friend named Ben, and the cameraman Eric, it dawned on me that ice fishing is far more like a combination of fly fishing and a Finnish sauna experience than it is actually fishing.

The most famous fly fishing quote is that catching a fish is the goal, but not the point. The point of fly angling is to achieve a zen-like state with the stream: It is an activity intended to calm a worried mind, and to provide a craftsman’s satisfaction when a fly you made actually catches a fish. Ice fishing is similar in that yes, you want to catch fish, but there’s an unspoken truth that unless you have one of those rare Red Lake-like bonanzas, catching lots of fish isn’t likely.

Stare into this long enough and you shall be one with everything…

But rather than the quiet, zen-like focus of fly angling — although a solo ice angler can achieve this by staring down a hole for eight hours — it’s more like that sauna: Chatty camaraderie, jokes and storytelling, beer, snacks and shit-talking. Four guys in an ice shack plus the obligatory heater can jack the inside temperature up into the 60s, so when you step outside for more beer or whatever, the icy shock feels wonderful.

But make no mistake: Unless you’re in that California-like combination of relative warmth and thick ice, the act of ice fishing is uncomfortable. I mean, you’re hanging out in the middle of a frozen lake, standing on ice and exposed to the winds. I dressed in my parka, fleece-lined Wranglers, wool layers throughout, and while my core was perfectly fine, my toes and hands got painful. I suppose those heat packets could have fixed that.

I was not warm…

So could catching fish. Interestingly, the act of catching a fish or shooting a bird or finding a mushroom can instantly transform you from miserable to perfectly fine — eager, even. It’s like a dopamine or adrenaline rush that makes you forget the elements and carry on… for a while.

I’m not going to tell you how our fishing trip went because I don’t want to spoil Nate’s show. Suffice to say that I am still ambivalent about this whole ice fishing thing. I’ll try it again, but I could not help thinking about the ocean, about sunscreen, Mexican beer, and about fish far too big to fit through an eight-inch-wide hole in the ice.

Still, I am glad I went. The companionship was worth every minute of icy fingers and frozen toes. And I took one more step into this latest chapter of my new Midwestern life.