THE DAY THE FISH GOT AWAY - Part one

THE DAY THE FISH GOT AWAY!
By: Ray Hansen

Dateline: Saturday, January 10, 2008 – Gladstone, Michigan

I chased fish all over the bay today but it was one of those tough times. Things just did not go right - on top of a tough bite – and I failed to land a fish for all the effort I put into looking for a few that would hit.

I started out in the darkness prior to sunrise with life-long friend Duane Deno of Gladstone, Michigan. We left from a lot he owns on the shores of Little Bay de Noc where we rode out onto the bay on his Honda four-wheeler. He drove and I sat backwards on the cargo rack on the back of the machine. We pulled a portable ice shack and all our fishing gear on a high-sided sled behind the all terrain vehicle like a small train with a couple boxcars behind it. I should have been swinging an old red lantern like a brakeman leaning out from the caboose.

Sunrise / moonset was spectacular. The sun brightened the eastern horizon into pink, orange, and mango streaks, as the moon touched the treeline to the west like a massive painted parchment pancake. It is at its closest approach to earth and has been putting on a show for the past few days. I’m sure astronomers worldwide have been seized with spasms of near-orgasmic delight in the past forty-eight hours or so by what they observe through telescopes trained on our celestial neighbor.

About 10 o’clock last night Kate and I went for a hike in the frigid woods around our home, just to experience this wonderful phenomenon. The moon was so bright it would have been possible to read a newspaper by moonlight alone. Almost no artificial lights exist nearby to compete with the intense lunar luminosity. We saw deer silhouetted against the snow as we made our way past hardwood ridges and spruce covered hillsides. In every direction snow crystals caught the moonlight, reflecting like tiny diamonds sprinkled along the path.

Anyway, Duane and I headed for an area we had not previously fished through the ice. Since we had taken walleyes there very late in the autumn season in open water, we figured we might still find them in the same location now that the lake was frozen. In most other years we had not been able to safely traverse the ice there until late January, but the freeze has been quite early this year. Just a few days ago an icebreaker passed this point and its course is still visible on the frozen bay as a jumble of clear, jagged ice like broken glass scattered along a highway after a crash.

In this spot, a sand and weed flat broke sharply at ten feet, descending into a thirty-five foot depression where a field of scattered boulders provided cover for perch, gobies, and various minnow species. Walleyes just had to be there, didn’t they? Duane and I were completely confident.

End of part one - check in tomorrow for part two

Copyright Ray Hansen, 2008