fishing

Fishing on Thin Ice

Saturday morning a friend was heading out ice fishing, and I decided to go along. Last winter I don’t know if I got out on the ice a single time, so I wanted to be sure to take the opportunity when I could. It’s the earliest in the year I’ve ever been ice fishing, and it was definitely a new experience. Over time, I’ve come to see that there are definite types of ice fishing. Early on, the ponds are generally clear of snow, so you can ice skate and play around a fair bit on the ice. Later, snow

A Camping Report

As I mentioned last week, the family and I headed to the great outdoors to go camping for our first time in five years. I really wasn’t sure how the trip would go. It was MC’s first time. DC’s second. And while I always would tell people that I liked to camp, I clearly haven’t done much of it recently. Plus, this wasn’t just going to be a camping trip. It was going to be a Camping Trip. I mean, we weren’t going to drive up to a camping spot, throw up a tent, and eat food out of the

Ice Fishing with Warm Feet? Is Such a Thing Possible?

Over winter break, I’d been hoping to get out ice fishing at least a few times. I had the time off, the ice would be fairly thin and hopefully slush free, so what could be better? (Side note: I know it might seem odd that I listed “thin ice” as one of the pluses of fishing early in the season. Aren’t I worried about falling through the ice? Not so much. Ice that’s 2 inches thick can technically support a 200 pound person. The thicker it gets, the amount of weight it can support goes up exponentially, so it doesn’t

Fillet o’ Fish

Went off fishing with the kiddos again yesterday on another gorgeous, serene, completely empty Maine pond. A lovely evening–storm clouds all around us, but they kept skirting the horizon instead of coming over to dump rain on our pond. We saw a few loons and a bald eagle, and I managed to get through the whole evening without a single mosquito bite. I must be doing something good. We were after white perch, a fish that has no catch limit in Maine. And we caught many. How many? I stopped counting. 50? 60? It wasn’t as many as we’ve caught

It’s Ice Fishing Time!

If someone had told me six and a half years ago that I’d be looking forward to ice fishing each year, I’d have thought they were crazy. Ice fishing seemed to be this exotic thing people did in exotic locations like Iceland or Greenland. Or Wisconsin. It was this complex thing where you needed a hut and a special kind of pole and who-knew-what for bait. And how would you know where to put the hole–and how to put it there? No–ice fishing was far too strange a beast for a novice fisherman like myself. Boy, was I wrong. Ice