Top Ten Things Not To Do When Ice Fishing

Our first Top Ten List, selected from a long history of ill advised antics, stupid tricks, and outright idiocy. Here we go.

• Number Ten -- Dump all the gear out of the plastic sled and try to use it as the board for a snowmobile propelled windsurfing jag in concert with the canvas of the portable shack.
• Number Nine -- Go get a drink out of that little puddle of open water out near the center of the pond.
• Number Eight -- Sleep in your homemade ice shack overnight, especially if you've had the time to install one of those vent free propane heaters on the inside, but no reflectors on the outside to keep snowmobiles from smashing into it.
• Number Seven -- Stab yourself in the hand with a rusty steak knife in a desperate attempt to open a can of Fancy Feast and chum your holes before the warden arrives to check your license.
• Number Six -- Dispute said warden about why that thirteen inch fish in your bucket is a Brook Trout who had a clean patch bit out of his tail fin, not a short togue that your dummy partner (or you) decided you were keeping no matter what species it was.
• Number Five -- Stick your thumb in a chain pickerel's mouth because he's half killed your last smelt and you still don't have a single salmon to take home to momma.
• Number Four -- Suspend the last of your beer from a string down into the hole nearest your shack, then drop a baited hook down the same hole and hope that you get the chance to wrestle an eight pound pissed of togue through a six pack of bud and an eight inch hole.
• Number Three -- In a drunken stupor, declare "Guy's don't worry, it's got enough gas in it. We're just going across the lake and back."
• Number Two -- Again in a drunken stupor, throw that friendly bald eagle that's been hanging around all day the only legal salmon you caught all day instead of one of those damned pickerel, because through your beer goggles you can't tell the difference between one and the other.
• Number One -- Throw your steel hole skimmer at said bald eagle, in front of said warden, because he's more than happy to make off with said salmon.

This is not an ice fishing blog written by some hot-shot southern Mainer bemoaning the introduction of the northern pike to his precious puddle of mud somewhere in the Augusta- Lewiston-Portland greater mudpuddle lakes region of the state. We are not professional fishermen, except for Bob, who might have been once, but nobody is really quite sure yet. We also can't figure out if he's Italian, Portuguese or mutt. Henceforth he will be known as Captain GGH (which is short for Captain Guinney Green-Horn). (For future reference, none of us knows why this name pisses him off so much, but we figure if any of us had ever worked on a fishing boat we would). Also along for most of these adventures will be Jean (Junior), Captain GGH's father and retired Boston Special Police Officer. (If this little clan of miscreants and ne'er do wells were a case of rum, Jean would be our fresh, hot pot of coffee.) Then we come to Joe and Nate, our friends from down south (Greater Bangor area), we don't accept friends or fishing partners from any farther south than that. (I REALLY MEAN THIS, SO AFTER YOU'VE SEEN THE PICTURES OF THE FISH WE CATCH, DO NOT EMAIL ME TRYING TO TAG ALONG! IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A DRIVERS LICENSE THAT SHOWS YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE AT LEAST PARALLEL TO BANGOR, DON'T BOTHER. MY COPY OF DELORMES MIGHT BE OLD AND TATTERED, BUT EVEN THROUGH A COFFEE STAIN I CAN SEE THAT NEWPORT IS SOUTH OF BANGOR. RUIN YOUR LAKES, NOT MINE!)

Anyway, as for Joe and Nate, we'll refrain from the Skipper and Gilligan comments for now, but you'll see the pictures anyway.

And well, now that we've broken the seal on the bottle of vintage Gilligan's Island references, you might as well consider me the Professor, because I'm the mad chemist who decided to take this mix of funny, entertaining, and sometimes outright bizarre personalities and mix them all up into one romping, rolling recipe for ice-fishing disaster.

The sites; Cold Stream Pond in Enfield, Saponac Pond in Burlington, Beech Hill Pond in Dedham, and, perhaps, if we can manage to all get the time off, Caribou Lake in Millinocket.

The weapons; a twentysomething year old Jiffy Model 30 Ice Auger, freshly ghetto-painted and tuned. A bag full of traps, a few new Polars, Hardwater Explorer's (Both the Wal-Mart and Dick's Sporting Goods variety) and Heritage Lakers, and a new Frabill 2-Man Portable Ice Shack (Just right for a thousand pounds of freezing cold fisherman.)

The bait; whatever we can yard out of Phat (and by this I do mean Pretty Hefty and Trucculent) Joe's pond. Probably emerald shiners, creek chubs, a few smelts, maybe a handful of baby brookies if we don't eat 'em all up before we go.) It seems our biggest problem is not catching the bait (to date Joe, er, Phat Joe, claims to have caught well into the hundreds, yet to have graciously released most of them), but traversing the ice on the pond to and from the minnow trap. (Hey Joe! You really should feel lucky. If it wasn't almost forty degrees that day, your testicles might have never come back. What's that? (indistinguishable garble) Yeah, yeah.
I know they aren't as big as they were before, but as long as the wife doesn't notice, you're probably all set.

The story about Joe and his testicles going through the ice we'll save for another post, but let's just say that from the dock, all I could see was ass-crack and muddy water.