Sight Fishing On the Ice, Looking In story and photos By Chris Pascone Mystery is the biggest draw of fishing. What’s happening underwater? Are there even any fish in the area? Fishing is a game of questions. While gimmicky modern electronics aim to give answers with screens and flashes, there’s a heritage fishing technique that’s provided answers for millennia as well: sight fishing. Originally used by the First Nations peoples, sight fishing requires cutting a wide hole in the ice and covering it with a pitch-dark shelter, essentially transforming the lake into your own aquarium. Here’s the how and why of doing it yourself. Sight fishing satisfies your curiosity by allowing you to see underwater. When you darken the area above your sight hole, the natural illumination filtering through the surrounding snow and ice, in contrast, lights up the world below you. Sunny days are perfect for sight fishing. The sport is particularly well suited to the clear water common in many northeastern Minnesota and Canadian lakes. It only takes a few simple tools to get started, and the results change how you look at fish, and fishing, forever. Tools of the trade: A sharp auger for drilling the four corner holes, a small shovel for clearing excess snow, a skimmer for removing slush, and an ice saw for cutting the four sides of the sight hole.
The beauty of sight fishing is in its simplicity. First you cut an approximately 36-by-20-inch hole in the ice. This is where the muscle comes in. You’ll need an auger for drilling the four corners of the rectangle. Then you “connect the dots” with a manual ice saw. This long, large-toothed tool looks worrisome at first, but is enjoyable to use. There are several ice saw producers from the upper Midwest and northern Europe today. Running $120 to $150, an ice saw brings you back in time to the lives of our ancestors. There’s a feeling of accomplishment to manually cutting through something as hard as ice. According to Rebecca Velde, a writer and first-time ice fisherwoman from Duluth who recently made her sight fishing debut in the Boundary Waters: “It was way easier than I thought it would be. It was like a hot knife cutting through butter. The ice was 15 inches thick, but we cut it in no time.” The more people you have in your group, the faster you can get the job done. Team building on ice!
Adriana Pascone getting a kick out of sight fishing in very clear water for trout. Having a dark shelter above your hole is key for the natural light filtering through the nearby snow and ice to illuminate the underwater world below. It is surprisingly bright down there. 16
JANUARY 2022
NORTHERN WILDS
The next step is either to push the rectangular block of ice down and under the surrounding ice shelf, or extract it out of the hole. To do the latter, try screwing a pair of ice screws into the block and giving a powerful pull. Dean Paron, a sight fisherman from Two Harbors, suggests best etiquette is to put the block back in the hole at the end of the day, so that it refreezes quickly, and to mark it with branches or other visible material. This prevents snowmobilers or other fishermen from accidentally falling in unknowingly.
