There was one winter about fifteen years ago when I did a lot of ice fishing, or at least more than I’d ever done before. It was also a period of time when I spent close to one full day each weekend brewing my own ales and stouts. It’s funny that I’d get so obsessed with these two activities at the same time, but then, winters in northern Vermont seem to stretch on forever and you have to do something to keep yourself from going crazy.

That particular winter was among the most severe I can recall. For weeks at a time, during January and February, the air temperature never once headed above zero degrees. For one frigid nine or ten day period, I don’t recall it ever warming up to more then ten degrees colder than that! So, spending one day indoors boiling wort, racking ale, and bottling beer and another day outside on the ice, fishing and freezing my ass off while drinking homebrew every weekend or so just seemed…so right.

Bob and Dave were my almost constant companions that winter. Dave was a very accomplished homebrewer and he and I would spend a lot of our time out on the ice trading recipes and sampling each other’s wares. I have to admit that his stuff was much better than mine, but he was always too polite to say so. I did catch him emptying a bottle of my brew once into one of the holes we’d drilled into the ice, but he assured me that by doing so, he would attract more fish to that spot. I suppose it might have qualified as chumming.

Bob, on the other hand, did not brew. He could drink pretty well though and that was one of the things he brought to the table. He was also an avid hunter and he would cook up delicious stews for our lunch, made from the venison and other game that he’d shot. Bob also owned a small tent, which we always brought out onto the ice with us. It helped a lot on especially cold or windy days to have a place to duck into when it got too rough to deal with outside. He’d heat up the stew he’d made on a small portable gas stove and then we’d feast on it as we enjoyed the fresh ales Dave and I had brewed. However, if you put three men in a confined space with an ample supply of homebrewed ales and venison – eventually you’re going to encounter a fairly substantial gaseous build up. I want you to envision the famous bean scene from Blazing Saddles and relocate it to tight plastic wrap inside a deep freezer instead. When the flatulence became too much to bear, it was clearly time to walk around outside and check our lines.

That aside, we always had a good time, even when it was really too frigging cold to fish.

There was one remarkable morning we spent on Lake Champlain. We had drilled our holes, baited our traps and had retired to the comfort of a shanty that we’d rented for the day from a guy I knew. This fellow really had quite an operation and he’d essentially built a little subdivision of shanties on the ice, complete with plowed roads and driveways. Each shanty was equipped with a wood stove, so it stayed very warm and there were even four holes drilled through the floorboards and the ice below it to allow us to fish inside, if we so chose.

On that morning we elected for a day of indoor angling.

As the tip ups we’d set outside gradually froze into their holes, our little group contented itself by catching and releasing what appeared to be an inexhaustible supply of yellow perch through the floor in the shanty. There were so many of them in fact that we ran out of bait by the middle of the afternoon. Dave took one of the few perch that he’d kept (it’d been hooked too deeply and had injured its gills on the hook) and removed the eyes. He carefully skewered them on his hook and lowered it into the hole closest to him.

Absolutely nothing happened. For a very pleasant lull, we drank beer, ate stew and swapped lies. The whole day had oozed into the warm tiredness that comes from getting up too early and doing too little for too long a time. I suppose that’s the reason why Dave suddenly appeared to launch himself through the air and damn near head first into the hole where his line was now taught and vibrating, indicating that something very large had hit the other end. Dave had been caught figuratively and almost entirely literally napping and he struggled to grab onto the line that was rapidly disappearing down into the hole.

Bob and I stood over Dave as he knelt, trying to control the fish. We offered all sorts of what we were sure was helpful advice as Dave politely, but loudly told us to shut the hell up. Once our best efforts had been rebuked, Bob and I then began to shower much colorful abuse on our friend, most of which can in no way be repeated on this blog. My daughter visits this site and I know the language her father used on that day would horrify her.

In spite of all the commotion, Dave slowly began to make some progress with his fish. After several tense minutes, he announced that he could see it.

You must realize that the ice we’d cut through was almost two feet thick, so really all that Dave was able to glimpse was the shadow image of his fish as it zipped back and forth in front of the bottom of the hole.

“How big is it?” Bob demanded at one point.

“Can’t tell,” Dave replied. He relaxed the line for a second or two and then pulled upwards as hard as he could.

Nothing. The fish remained below us. Dave repeated this move and still the fish was no closer to him.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him. But it was soon obvious. Dave was trying to slip the fish’s head into the lower end of the hole so that he might pull it lengthwise through what now felt like a very narrow hollow in the ice. We’d drilled, using an eight-inch auger and it now seemed quite possible that Dave’s fish might be too big to fit through that opening.

But Dave was patient and after several more wait and jerk movements, he eased the fish into the hole. Of course this immediately proved to be less of a solution than a problem as the fish wedged itself firmly, with its nose barely breaking the plane of the top of the hole.

“Go in and get him!” Bob laughed as we watched the big fish’s jaws clamp open and closed.

Dave responded with a stream of obscenities, but he did actually reach one hand around those jaws and their sharp teeth and inched his way down to the gill plate. It was a very tight fit, but Dave was able to get his middle finger inside the gill opening. He squatted over the hole and with a final heave that looked vaguely like an Olympic weight lifter’s clean and jerk; he wrestled the writhing fish up out of the hole and into his arms.

It was an enormous northern pike! All of the kidding we’d dumped on Dave was forgotten as Bob and I marveled at how our friend had pulled this off. There were any number of ways he could have lost his fish and so we truly admired his patience and perseverance. For those moments, he was a genius and he grinned as he drank in the moment.

I don’t remember which one of us asked the most obvious of questions, the one that would puncture this mood of good cheer and fellowship like the point of a pin on the tight surface of a balloon.

“So Dave, how are you gonna get that damned thing back into the water?”

Copyright 2009 by Peter Cammann