Ice fishing recon trip-Yeti sighting
Met Steve this morning at Swedes Diner in Mulliken to fuel up for our first ice fishing trip of the 2017-18 season. -9 when I got there at 7:50 and I was wondering what was wrong with our heads. Nobody should be fishing in that kind of weather. I had plenty of clothes and a portable shanty with a heater so I figured if I had to hole up out of the weather so be it. Steve had similar thoughts.
After a good breakfast and a stop for bait we were headed north to a private 75 acre lake that my sister has a lot on. It was -4 when we arrived but there was no wind and the sun was shining bright. We drilled a series of holes and started searching for fish. I landed a 3" perch right away and thought it was going to be one of those days, freeze our tails off and don't catch any quality fish.
It wasn't to long and I heard Steve holler like he had hooked Moby Dick. It ended up being a nice largemouth (striped carp) that was put back down the hole after posing for a picture. The sun was beating down on us and I was drilling holes and dragging my shanty around the lake and I soon realized I was seriously overdressed to the point where I was over heating so I did the only logical thing, I took my clothes off. Shirtless in -4 weather never felt so good. Steve says Squach but in the snow it has to be Yeti.
After a couple of hours of wandering around, drilling holes looking for fish I finally marked a decent fish and when I dropped my smelt stick(hali knock off) I got a good hit right away. Now I thought I had Moby Dick, This critter was putting up quite a fight, bending my 48" Ice Blue rod nearly double. It ended up being a 18" northern pike that was none to happy with me. It was one of 4 that same size we caught during the day.
I drilled two more holes going out towards the middle of the lake and when I dropped the transducer in the first hole, the bottom 4' lit up like a Christmas tree. When I dropped my bait down to them, They came up to meet it on the way down. I landed maybe 25-30 gills and had 8 decent fish on the ice and wanted to get Steve to move over nearer to me but he was quite a ways away. I didn't know whether to leave a hot hole or just holler and have everyone on the lake crowding in on us so I, again, did the logical thing-nothing. It wasn't long and Steve came wandering over and set up next to me and we both continued to catch fish after fish after fish. At 3:00 we did a fish count and were 8 short of our limit. We set 3:30 as our leave time and shortly before that Steve landed a nice crappie, his first of the day and we decided to call it a day. We ended the day with 45 gills and 2 crappie. Most of the gills we kept were in the 7-7 1/2 range with a few at the 8" mark. We were fishing 22 FOW and were catching fish up as high as 6' off bottom. The ice was around 12" thick.
Steve was able to get a few pictures that he will add later.
I do need to say that as we were going through Ionia on the way north and again on the way home, I saw a lot of pasty skinned, red haired snotty nosed kids hanging out along the river, they resembled someone we all know and love, can you guess who??? Hint: one of them had a car alarm wired into the door of his cardboard box condo.
