Still Working for
I
After All These Years... By: Gord Pyzer
I
caught my first lake trout through a hole in the ice almost 60 years ago, and I remember it as clearly now as the day it happened. I walked out from Willow Beach on the eastern shore of southern Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, a backpack full of ice fishing gear slung over my shoulder and a long handled axe in my hand. I had been ice fishing for walleyes and yellow perch for years using a hand auger – my school buddy’s parents had emigrated from Finland and I had one of the first Rapala hand driven marvels – but a six-inch auger wasn’t going to cut it for lake trout. So I started swinging away with the axe.
eight or ten inch opening, you have to start with a much wider aperture. Think of a funnel or tornado that is broad up top and narrow as you reach the spout. It was a brilliant strategy, too, right up to the point when I pierced through the last
unwrapped a foot of line so I knew the precise depth. What? Where was my sonar? Are you kidding?
Now, if you’ve never chopped a hole through two feet of blue ice, you have to realize that if you want to end up with an
inch or so of ice and watched the lake water fill the kid-size swimming pool. In order to increase the opening at the bottom now, I had to chop through two feet of water. By the time I’d chiseled away enough ice to create a jagged six inch orifice, I was drenched to the bone. But I was lake trout fishing. I grabbed a homemade plywood ice rod from the pack that was 2 1/2-inches wide and precisely one foot long, with half moon-shaped ends around, which I had coiled my monofilament line. I tied on a genuine silver Russian spoon — also courtesy of my Finnish school buddy – that had a red bead at the hook. I tipped it with an emerald shiner minnow and dropped it down the hole, carefully counting how many times I
I remember jigging the minnow draped spoon – it remains to this day, one of the deadliest walleye lures – and suddenly feeling a whack. I set the hook, fought the trout and brought it up to the bottom of the hole. But I couldn’t fit its head through the serrated opening. So I let it run, holding the line in my left hand, while I chopped away frantically with my right. How I managed not to sever the line is a mystery I will never understand: nonetheless, with the hole marginally bigger, I pulled the trout’s head into the opening where it got wedged like a gill net. Then I plunged both arms and my upper body into the frigid water, grabbed the fish behind the gills and hauled it onto the ice. Where it immediately froze into a three foot long shape that resembled a slab of rough cut lumber that, a few hours later, I popped over my shoulder and proudly carried off the lake. Oh, boy, how ice fishing for lake trout has changed since then. Today, for example, we’re cruising at 60 miles-an-hour plus into the backcountry on snowmachines, quads (Continued on page 10.)
Just Fishing . 8
Winter 2024
