It's In The Blood

Now this may sound like a tale, but it is a true story and a great tip for the upcoming ice fishing season.

As darkness surrounds my friend and I in our ice fishing shanty, we chat of fishing trips past and hopes of big bites throughout the night. The bites were slow but the night was not uneventful.

Deciding it was time to freshen up my bait I reeled up lure and removed the lifeless minnow, replacing it with a lively fresh shiner. Dropping my baited jig back into the water, I thought I would lean over and see just how far visibility is under the ice in the middle of the night. Well, there was much more visibility than I thought because as I leaned forward to get a better look, my flashlight, which I had been holding under my arm, plopped into the water, still glowing brightly as it made its' way to the bottom of the lake. 14 feet below us, my flashlight landed on the floor of the lake pointing directly up at us. A beam of light cut through the aquatic darkness, illuminating thousands of freshwater zooplankton giving the water a milky white glow. It was cool but I really wanted my flashlight back.

Believe it or not it only took about 4 attempts with a big jigging spoon to hook just under the lip of the screw on top of the flashlight and raise it to the surface. We had a good laugh and figured that was probably a sign to call it a night.

We stowed all the items that would be left in the shanty and laoded the remaining gear in a sled to take home. Our minnow bucket was loaded with fresh bait that we really did not want to throw away as we were sure to go back out fishing sometime over the next few days so we decided to submerge the minnows under the ice in a mesh screen type bucket. A common practice to keep minnows alive between fishing outings.We were lacking a good weight to keep the minnow bucket submerged but we were able to put our heads together and realized that we could use the ice spud. It was 5 feet of solid steel so it was surely enough weight to keep the bait below the ice. A rope tied into the shanty ceiling and then onto the bucket, with the ice spud rope tied to the bucket then lowered into the hole in the shanty floor was all it took.About a week later we found time to go fishing again so we headed out to the shanty.

This time it was daylight and a beautiful sunny winter day it was. All was good. Well all was good until we opened the shanty door and were dumbfounded that we never considered the fact that the fishing hole would freeze over and the spud needed to chop open the hole was now suspended under several inches of fresh ice, keeping our bait as lively as could be. Needless to say, we packed up and called it a day.

Now you might jump to conclusion about our intelligence but let me assure you, my buddy and I are actually both quite smart. The real problem here is as the title of this story says,"It's in the blood", for you see my last name is Krajenka, and my buddys' is Petrosky. Now if that doesn't say it all.

This weeks tip.

If you are going to keep your minnows alive in the winter, suspending them in a mesh bucket under the ice works great. Just be sure to take an anchor, a brick, a dumbell, anything for a weight other than your ice spud.