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If I had my druthers, it would be low pressure, gray over the far, far black treeline, and the ridges beyond the treelines would be gone. 33 degrees Fahrenheit, and if it was even warmer and with no wind there might be a haze – a fog – off to the far gray treeline.
If we snowshoe across the lake on the snowmobile trail it’s hard-packed but forgiving, and it’s like that – though even softer – if we follow our own snowshoe trail across the lake to the other lake. Sometimes we have no trail and in the warmest weather in the middle of a low-pressure system the snow will be deep and crystalline. Going overland to a lake meant you were beyond a frontier and bordered from the world.
Either way the sled dragging behind slides on a glaze of melted water like a bolt in its barrel. The sled could be handmade, of wood, on skids, or a toboggan, or a kid’s plastic Power Rangers sledding sled. Just as long as the rope is the right length, and by my druthers with a body strap or shoulder straps for the drag.
The far lake might be slushy, it might have standing water. I wear calf-length rubbers and snowshoes, and the snowshoes can help laboring in the slush or make it worse. I don’t mind the slush. It keeps certain elements away.
In that weather the long drag in is done with wool; wool underwear and a wool sweater. Crossing the big lake, a slight breeze helps cutting through the wool to keep you chilled, refrigerated.
Because then you have to drill, and you sweat more. Depending on the strength in your party, and whether they’re paying you or not, it may be half a dozen holes. In January the ice is 18 inches or 20 inches or 2 feet deep. Sometimes you’re on your knees cranking.
First things last, we’ve always said. Get the first hole drilled and first line down. Then you’re fishing and everything else is duck soup.
In the low pressure the water comes up hard and high. When the hole is scooped out on a warm low-pressure day you can look into the hole and here already are ice mites and nymphs and aquatic insects, come up to the under-ice surface. Trout food.
I always have my druthers when I use my one-ounce lead depth-finder that hangs from my lapel for the season, and when I attach it to the #6 gold Eagle Claw plain hook and drop it the tip-up spool spins freely downward into the dark and then stops.
I measure the depth by my wingspan, which I call six feet because that’s what we’ve always called it, though it’s probably a little less. One, two, three, four wingspans. 24 feet. Or maybe it’s 17 or 18 or 19 feet. Maybe 30 or 40 or 60. It’s not important. In the low pressure the lake trout might be any depth; most importantly, they might be anywhere in the water column. Sometimes they come up floating in the low pressure all the way to under the ice. The rainbows too.
If I had my druthers, it would be me and my buddy Mikey or my brother and his friends Towne or Nate, guys who can drag and drill, or clients like a young husband and wife or a single guy and his son. Best of all is if at least one of them has never experienced this before. Then I can show them things; things that I like; maybe see them catch a fish.
An old Arctic Fisherman tip-up rigged with black braided line and an 18-inch leader and an eighth-ounce split shot sinker partway up and a minnow just off bottom is deadly. Also deadly is a jigging rod with a Jig’n Rap in perch (a natural baitfish imitation) or white (lakers are attracted by flash and light contrast).
Another method I use is a large white tube jig (a heavy jig head, single hook or more, with a soft plastic body and dancing white plastic legs). This I will jig on the bottom in the marl, or off the bottom, or up the water column, all the way to under the ice.
I tip the hook of the tube jig with half a preserved sucker minnow. I prepare my own preserved sucker minnows. Any live minnows that are left over from early season fishing I put in a pie tin, then kill with salt, let dry for a few days, and put them in a Ziploc bag, maybe with coffee grounds, or garlic, or spritzes of WD-40. These are all said to be secret attractants, and I have used them with some success. Sucker minnows don’t work as well as shiners for this method because a dried sucker minnow falls apart too easily; it’s too greasy and fatty. The shiner is the firmer minnow. I guess the shiner is my druther.
I don’t get all my druthers all at once. That would be masochistic. I wouldn’t deserve that. I don’t get most of them, probably, but some of the above are in my control, and those are enough to make it all way cool. And this is how it is sometimes. Cool. And I’d rather not have it any other way.
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