From the Gone Fishing Archives: On thick ice

As much as it pains me to admit it, most of my ice fishing forays have been abject failures. Usually, I hit the hard water in the brutal stretches of winter--the cold, gray, numb foot days where you venture outside only because you're sick of stale air and bad television. Usually, I stick it out for a few futile hours and stagger home exhausted, with nothing to show for my efforts.

One day last March, I got a taste of the good side of ice fishing. J and I were spending a late winter weekend at Cass Lake. The conditions were freaky-glorious. Mild temps, fresh snow, and cobalt skies that went well with my handsome bright blue Minnesota Department of Corrections jacket.

We trundled a hundred yards or so off the West Shore of Star Island, carrying lawn chairs, sandwiches and some basic ice fishing gear, and I punched a few holes in the ice. Actually, "punched" isn't the right word because, as usual, my auger was dull. It was a minor miracle I didn't bust a vein while boring through ice two and half feet thick.

Anyway, J listened to Johnny Paycheck and soaked up the sun, while I fooled a bunch of curious yellow perch with a simple fathead/jig presentation.

Oh, for my fishing homies: the perch were located in six to eight foot water.

Greetings from Pacifica

The winds kept that nasty San Francisco Bay oil spill from spreading to the south, so the Pacifica Pier--unlike the SF Municipal Pier and a bunch of other piers and beaches in the bay and points north--remained open on Friday.

Crabbing was slow. This red crab was keeper sized, but he was missing his right pincer. Since most of the meat is in the pincer, I tossed him back. Sometimes, I am a beneficent despot.

I didn't make any notable catches. A couple red crabs. A couple starfish. Like I said, it was slow. But as you can see from the image below, it was so freaking beautiful, the catch didn't matter.

Also, I bought my first snare trap--five or six bucks at the Rusty Hook. I think I got the hang of it.

My four least favorite words

"Fishing is strictly prohibited."

From the Gone Fishing archives: The casual catman at work

The date: July 6, 2006
The location: River John's houseboat on the Mississippi River in northeast Minneapolis
The angler: Cory Parkos
The technique: Fathead minnow on circle hook
The catch: An eating sized channel cat
The experience: Obviously, pretty comfortable. If at all feasible, you should make a point of fishing for channel cats while sitting in a reclining chair. It is one of the few human pursuits with no discernible downside. From an angling perspective there is another advantage: it gives you an extra measure of patience, always a virtue for the fisherman.

At the Pacifica Pier, it's better to be a gull than a shark

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours at the Pacifica Pier, hoping to catch some Dungeness crab. The Dungeness season opened Saturday, so the pier was a lot busier than I'd seen in my two previous trips. A little rowdier, too, with fairly robust defiance of city ordinances that forbid such favored activities of the pier fishermen as overhead casting, drinking, and smoking.

I didn't see anyone catch a Dungeness, but there were rock crabs to be had. I picked up a couple of undersized ones in my hoop net, which I baited with squid.

The guys who were using the snare traps you can cast had better results--probably because they could cover so much more territory. Whatever the reason, they caught more and bigger crabs than hoop net yokels like me.

They also made some strange catches.

The smiling fellow at the left caused a big commotion at the end of the pier after he somehow managed to lasso this sand shark with his snare. Another crabber took down a seagull in flight while casting his.

The seagull was okay after the two dudes in the picture below untangled the line from the bird's wings. (As always, you can click on the picture to enlarge for a better view). They were very competent fellows, treated the bird with delicacy. I admired that, since it's easy for a pier fisherman to view the gulls as nothing but nuisance. They steal bait, make a racket, and shit like fiends. Still, the dudes were gentle with the bird.

The shark was less fortunate. It was half strangled and bleeding as a consequence of the snare around its neck. After the guy removed the snare (with a foot placed indelicately on the shark's throat), he stuffed it in a bag.

Looking at that shark in the bag--its tail sticking lifelessly from one end--I felt bad. I felt worse after I got home and Jen and I watched the movie Sharkwater, which documents how China, with its new affluence and old taste for shark fin soup, is causing a worldwide collapse in shark populations. Appalling on many levels.

From the Gone Fishing archives: My smallest largemouth

While poking around the GF archives, I came across this: a shot of the smallest largemouth I ever caught.

Obviously, it is a proud moment. Yet my memory of the details is hazy. I'm pretty sure the leviathan was boated at Cass Lake, somewhere in the vicinity of Lodge Point, late in the summer. I remember that only because it is a little unusual to catch largemouth on Cass, especially if you're not fishing Allens Bay.

From the look of the tackle, I was probably fishing with fatheads, drifting for perch or walleye, when this scrappy character made his unexpected move.

He's got nice color and markings, don't you think?