Author's note: This is the final part of the series I started Monday. I hope you have enjoyed it.
It was one-thirty in the afternoon when we got situated. Within the first half-hour something slammed a rod downward that I had balanced on a bucket while changing baits on another. It hit like a small pike does, slashing past, grabbing the bait like a running thief grabbing an apple off a fruit wagon without stopping. I missed that fish as well, and that’s when we packed it in for the day.
On the way back to the truck, we detoured past an eighty-acre island surrounded by marshlands with plenty of cat-tails and open areas between brushy pockets of cover. An ancient railroad grade crossed the island diagonally like the spine on a razorback hog. I once stalked to within twenty-five yards of two bedded deer on this island while hunting with a bow along the elevated trackway. Thick brush along its sides however, prevented me from getting a clear shot, and the deer soon bounded away.
We found several sets of coyote tracks leading into the interior, so we put together two brush blinds on the perimeter where we could hide while using predator calls and rabbit decoys to try to get the brush-wolves to show themselves. We’ll come back with small caliber rifles in late January when the coyotes are always hungry. I would like to get a big pelt to hang on the wall along with mounted fish and deer antlers.
As for today’s fishing, I enjoyed the experience despite the meager results. I’m lucky to be living in an area where I can enjoy the outdoors as often as I do, and we’ll have ice into April on the bays around here. I’ve got plenty of time to explore new areas and look for new ice-fishing adventures. And you can be sure I’ll have some new stories to tell around the campfire.
Copyright Ray Hansen, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
THE DAY THE FISH GOT AWAY - Part two
Author's note: This is part two of a blog that details one recent day of ice fishing on Little Bay de Noc in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The final installment will be posted tomorrow evening.
We set up the shanty directly at the point where the drop-off leveled out onto the flat. I baited a double-hook minnow rig with one flashy three-inch shiner at one foot off bottom and another at three feet up. That rod had a spring-steel strike indicator on the tip and I set it in a holder so it could work itself while a readied a second rig for perch. This one had a bright gold spoon as an attractor, a two-inch clear leader off the spoon, and a bright orange, needle-sharp plain hook on the end of the leader. It was baited with a live wiggler and lowered down so it rested just above the boulders.
I settled in to work the perch rig by lightly jigging it, while the walleye rig worked itself. The two shiner minnows swam around, keeping the strike indicator dancing lightly. After a while, the spring steel on the tip of the double-hook rig bent downward very slowly, which told me a fish was mouthing the bait. I rested the perch rig on the edge of the seat and took the other rod in hand. I lowered the rod tip for a few seconds to let the fish get the minnow fully, then I raised the rod tip until I started to feel the weight of the fish.
I was sure I’d set the hook into a walleye, but when I snapped the rod upward, the perch rod shot downward, falling to the floor. I grabbed for it while continuing to raise the other rod. Almost instantly I realized that whatever took the shiner minnow had crossed the line on the wiggler rig. The two were tangled! I tried to open the bail on the second rod so I would have a chance to land the other fish, but it just didn’t work. Whatever hit the shiner rig was gone and that was that!
While this was going on, Duane tried to quickly reel in his lines, and possibly take the perch rig from my side of the shanty, but it all happened quickly and we did not salvage anything from the brief flurry of excitement.
After a couple hours or so we had no more action on that spot, so we moved up to the weed edge on top of the underwater slope. There we could easily see the bottom in ten feet of water and we sight-fished small ice lures tipped with wigglers for perch, but had absolutely no action.
O.K., if nothing was going on shallow or at the base of the drop-off, we decided to head out to fifty feet of water east of the place we started and try for bigger perch from the depths. This was also the type of place whitefish sometimes hold in, so I put a simple split-shot and plain hook rig down, with the shot laying on bottom and the minnow swimming around it. This is generally the way whitefish like their bait presented.
Here again, we spent time trying to make something happen. I did see one fish approach on the screen of my locator and it may have picked up the minnow – the signal produced by my bait and that of the fish merged on the screen – but I did not get a good hookset. Too much stretch in fifty feet of four-pound test monofilament I guess. I also worked a deep-water perch rig baited with a wiggler here, but nothing bit.
We moved a few hundred yards at a time, working our way toward south toward the mouth of the Escanaba River, looking for roaming bands of perch, but it seemed that when we zigged, they zagged, when we hopped, they skipped. In the end our paths just didn’t cross. Arriving at the river mouth, we set up well out into the bay, because the constant flow of the river itself makes the ice there unstable. The mouth of the river forms a kind of broad delta that ranges from five to fourteen feet deep, then drops into twenty-six feet well out into the bay. That’s where we made a final attempt to salvage the day.
End of part two - check in tomorrow evening for part three.
Copyright Ray Hansen, 2009
We set up the shanty directly at the point where the drop-off leveled out onto the flat. I baited a double-hook minnow rig with one flashy three-inch shiner at one foot off bottom and another at three feet up. That rod had a spring-steel strike indicator on the tip and I set it in a holder so it could work itself while a readied a second rig for perch. This one had a bright gold spoon as an attractor, a two-inch clear leader off the spoon, and a bright orange, needle-sharp plain hook on the end of the leader. It was baited with a live wiggler and lowered down so it rested just above the boulders.
I settled in to work the perch rig by lightly jigging it, while the walleye rig worked itself. The two shiner minnows swam around, keeping the strike indicator dancing lightly. After a while, the spring steel on the tip of the double-hook rig bent downward very slowly, which told me a fish was mouthing the bait. I rested the perch rig on the edge of the seat and took the other rod in hand. I lowered the rod tip for a few seconds to let the fish get the minnow fully, then I raised the rod tip until I started to feel the weight of the fish.
I was sure I’d set the hook into a walleye, but when I snapped the rod upward, the perch rod shot downward, falling to the floor. I grabbed for it while continuing to raise the other rod. Almost instantly I realized that whatever took the shiner minnow had crossed the line on the wiggler rig. The two were tangled! I tried to open the bail on the second rod so I would have a chance to land the other fish, but it just didn’t work. Whatever hit the shiner rig was gone and that was that!
While this was going on, Duane tried to quickly reel in his lines, and possibly take the perch rig from my side of the shanty, but it all happened quickly and we did not salvage anything from the brief flurry of excitement.
After a couple hours or so we had no more action on that spot, so we moved up to the weed edge on top of the underwater slope. There we could easily see the bottom in ten feet of water and we sight-fished small ice lures tipped with wigglers for perch, but had absolutely no action.
O.K., if nothing was going on shallow or at the base of the drop-off, we decided to head out to fifty feet of water east of the place we started and try for bigger perch from the depths. This was also the type of place whitefish sometimes hold in, so I put a simple split-shot and plain hook rig down, with the shot laying on bottom and the minnow swimming around it. This is generally the way whitefish like their bait presented.
Here again, we spent time trying to make something happen. I did see one fish approach on the screen of my locator and it may have picked up the minnow – the signal produced by my bait and that of the fish merged on the screen – but I did not get a good hookset. Too much stretch in fifty feet of four-pound test monofilament I guess. I also worked a deep-water perch rig baited with a wiggler here, but nothing bit.
We moved a few hundred yards at a time, working our way toward south toward the mouth of the Escanaba River, looking for roaming bands of perch, but it seemed that when we zigged, they zagged, when we hopped, they skipped. In the end our paths just didn’t cross. Arriving at the river mouth, we set up well out into the bay, because the constant flow of the river itself makes the ice there unstable. The mouth of the river forms a kind of broad delta that ranges from five to fourteen feet deep, then drops into twenty-six feet well out into the bay. That’s where we made a final attempt to salvage the day.
End of part two - check in tomorrow evening for part three.
Copyright Ray Hansen, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
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
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
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