School of fishermen (page 2)
Nelson tells us that business is brisk between January and the spring thaw in March, and
when the bungalows are filled to their capacity of 62 people, the quiet bay becomes a bustling
village on ice. Mostly, he says, it’s guys and their buddies looking for a weekend
away from home. But because it’s mid-week, we have the place to ourselves, which is
just as well. We confess to Nelson that we don’t really know what we’re doing,
so he happily agrees to show us the ropes.
Luckily for us, there is little skill involved in ice fishing. Drop your line, and the bait
does the work. You need only break a sweat reeling in your catch. While experienced fishermen
use miniature rods and reels that are about a third the length of regular poles, we take
the lazy man’s route, the tip-up — a wooden stick tied with fishing line that
balances over a small hole with the help of a bracket on the floor. To signal a bite, the
stick tilts toward the water. How much more foolproof could it be?
Lake Nipissing is known for a variety of species, including walleye, or pickerel, pike and
perch. The bait of choice is the emerald shiner minnow, and the idea, says Nelson, is to
hook it through the dorsal fin so that it’s wounded but not killed. It’s a small
consolation to the animal lover in me.
We fish for a few hours, keeping a careful eye on our tip-ups, occasionally jigging the
lines, but nothing. We take a break and throw some burgers on the barbecue for a late dinner
and then try again, but still, the only fish we find are the minnows at the end of our hooks.
Nelson stops by on his regular journey to clean the outhouses and says he’s talked
to another local outfitter who’s having better luck farther out on the bay. He offers
to take us there first thing in the morning.
I go to bed thinking of a time, many years ago, when my grandfather was having a similar
run of luck on the ice. One day at lunch, when he ambled back up the hill to the cottage
to grab a bite to eat and fill his Thermos with tea, my mother and grandmother snuck down
to his fishing shack and attached a box of frozen fish sticks to his line so that he could
say he’d caught some fish that week. It seemed hilarious at the time, but now I fall
asleep wondering if beer wasn’t the only thing I forgot to pack.
One of the best times of day for ice fishing, Rob Hyatt tells us at his shack near the mouth
of Lake Nipissing, is the first hour of light after sunrise. Which is why we hustled out
of our sleeping bags in the -17°C weather and skipped breakfast to huddle over a hole
in the ice at 8 a.m.
A seasoned fisherman dressed in a camouflage snow mobile suit, Hyatt has barely set our
lines before mine starts to bob. I grab it and jig slowly, before giving it a sharp tug.
Greg looks on with mild interest as I start reeling.
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