Beginner Ice Fishing
Ice Fishing is one of those things that I’ve always been meaning to try. Winter can be a tough season, especially in a city, but I’ve always believed that seasonal complainers would be happier outside than in. For Canadians, ice fishing is an age-old means of getting out there and getting at it.
For the beginner, ice fishing seems both particularly easy and particularly difficult. Especially for an urban-dweller, who wants to go the DIY route. Ice fishing seems easy because it is, at heart, straighforward. Get out on the ice, drill a hole, bait a hook, and drop a line. Even better, if you don’t have a boat it doesn’t matter – during the winter in Canada we can walk where we float in summer.
Great, sounds nice, but think of all of the barriers. Which lakes do I fish? Where the hell do I drill the hole? What bait to use? How do I know if the ice is safe? Is this going to be crushingly boring? What am I even fishing for? Using what techniques?
These difficulties are compounded by the apparent need for an ice hut or a maybe a snowmobile, or perhaps a powered auger. Sounds pricey. And, because it can be pretty unpleasant on the open water in the Canadian winter, it can be hard to justify buying special equipment only to go out and fail in the cold.
Luckily, some people who know what they’re doing came to our aid.
For a while we’ve been reading a blog called omnivore culture, kept by a couple named Mike and Cora-Lynn. Recently, we got in touch to discuss a possible podcast together, and Mike graciously invited Liam and I out to join them for a day of ice fishing on the bay of Quinte.
After a fluorescent-lit, greasy-spoon breakfast, Liam and I drove out to meet Mike at the end of a snowy road, on his family property overlooking the white expanse of the bay of Quinte. They bay is a large, shallow bay of Lake Ontario, large enough to be a lake in and of itself.
It became clear very quickly that, not only is Mike a consummate host (he even had a bottle of local wine for us!), he also has fishing his own waters down to a science. He doesn’t use any of the gear you worry about needing. Instead we loaded up a basic plastic toboggan with three ice rods, a hand auger, ladles to scoop ice out of the holes, a tackle box, a bucket full of minnows and two basic, portable fish finders.
Then the trudging began. Not using a snowmobile to hike out to the middle of a vast, frozen bay has the advantage of providing a free leg workout. If you’re the mug pulling the toboggan, a core workout too. Using a boating app called Navionics, Mike led us to a deep bowl in the otherwise fairly flat bottom. There, he said, yellow perch tend to stack up. How do you know whether there are yellow perch in the lake to begin with? Mike advised to check out fish ON-line (if you’re in Ontario).
Perch fishing technique, it turns out, is also pretty straightforward. Bait an ice fishing jig bait with half a minnow, drop it down to the bottom. Then raise and lower the bait, for a minute or two, bouncing it off the bottom. This stirs up silt and causes attractive disturbance to fish. Then simply reel in a bit, jigging the bait within 5 feet of the bottom. A fish finder helps build confidence to see what is going on down there, but isn’t strictly necessary if you know where to look for fish.
And it worked! We pulled through an eater within the first 15 minutes. More followed, all too small to keep. Unfortunately, after the initial run, the fish petered out. Not the fault of our hosts; more a function of the time of year.
It was a ton of fun – there is a curious, zen-like quality to the procedure and, so long as you don’t have to walk too far or drill through too much ice, the lake is your oyster (assuming, of course, that the ice is safe!).
Mike and Cora-Lynn, being the lovely people they are, made sure we left with a few extra fillets from prior outing.
Looks like I’m in the market for an auger.
