Ice fishing

New Year brings in new experience: ice fishing
By Josh Salm /Staff Writer
Date published: Jan. 7, 2009
Fishing is a sport I picked up just a few years ago, back when I was a sophomore in college at the University of Wisconsin. My roommate Tim was an avid fisherman and was actually the head of the UW Fishing Team at one time, so his love for the sport rubbed off on me a little and I picked it up.
But, oddly enough, it was only open water fishing that I took to. I never went ice fishing, despite the fact Tim stored an ice shanty, auger, tip-ups, various other gear and even a fish tank full of bait in our cramped dorm room.
For some reason, the sport just did not appeal to me back then and to this day I cannot understand why.
When I mentioned my lack of ice fishing to a friend the other day, he looked at me and said, “Isn’t it a law or something in Wisconsin for you to have to ice fish?”
It’s not. I checked, although there are some strange laws on the books in Wisconsin like “Margarine may not be substituted for butter in restaurants unless it is requested by the customer,” according to dumblaws.com. Maybe I’ll have to try that out when I go home next.
Anyway, I finally broke down this past weekend. I went with a handful of friends to a small camp on Sysladobsis Lake just south of Springfield and partook in the Maine tradition of ringing in the New Year ice fishing.
After three straight days of pulling tip-ups, baiting hooks in frigid temperatures and playing “human curl-bocce,” a hybrid between curling and bocce where you aim to get as close to the cooler as possible by using people in chairs as curling stones , I can say this: I’m hooked.
Six other friends and myself spent three days starting on New Year’s Day in a rustic camp on a piece of land that juts out into the lake. We put out 25 traps between the all of us, and in that time we brought home enough white perch, salmon and even this strange looking fish called a cusk to have a small fish fry in the coming weeks.
This wasn’t what some call hard-core ice fishing, with propane heaters, ice shanties and frozen fingers and toes involved. Instead, when the winds got to bitter and cold, we’d all head inside, warm up and watch for those small flags to go shooting skyward. When it was nice outside, we had a blast enjoying a fine Maine winter day.
I’m pretty certain actually that those few days of ice fishing has created a Pavlovan response in me, because I hear the word “flag” now and my ears perk up and I start scanning the horizon for those bright green and orange tip-up flags to signal a fish is on.
The second a flag did pop up, there were four or five of us just bolting out the door to pull that ice out of the water and see what we caught. There were quite a few times I remember skating across the ice in a pair of jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of black slippers, leaving my Carhartts, boots and crampons back in the camp to stay warm. I began to wonder at the end of the weekend if the guy in the ice shanty on the other side of the lake thought we were all a bunch of crazy kids after seeing us run in and out of the camp screaming and hollering all the time.
After talking to Eric, who’s grandfather owns the camp, our weekend of fishing has been better than most over the past 20-some years at the camp — records at the camp prove it. All I know is, for the past 20-some years I’ve been kicking, I can say for certain the opening weekend of ice fishing in Maine was the most fun I had fishing ever.
The only downside to the whole weekend, besides the whole “outhouse in the middle of the winter” part of camp, was that elusive ninja salmon that kept tipping our traps but always managed to never get hooked. I think I may have to convince Eric and the crew to make another trip to camp in the coming weeks with a bunch of smelts and a few traps to catch that fish.