It’s 8:20 a.m. and 10 degrees outside. My fingertips
are beginning to numb inside my new Isotoner gloves. I wear long underwear and jeans,
but a frosty wind rips through them as if they were fishnet stockings. My pen
freezes and I can’t take notes. At such an extreme temperature, my digital
voice recorder’s display is hardly functioning and my camera shutter won’t
click. I believe my tools and I are suffering from the early stages of
hypothermia.
I’d certainly be doomed on Mount Everest.
Fortunately, I’m standing on 4-inch-thick ice in the middle of the northeast
corner of Irondequoit Bay, and my car is about 200 yards away if I’m really
desperate. It’s quite cold, but my alter ego keeps telling me, “Stop
complaining. You’re writing about ice fishing, what did you expect? Of course
it’s quite cold.”
My alter ego and I begin to argue, and now I’m
certain of hypothermia. I don’t see the Grim Reaper yet, but even he probably
waits until the weather warms.
My wife told me before departing this morning, “Are
you going alone? What if the people there don’t like you? If you fall in, would
they help? You better take the cell phone.”
The dangers of ice fishing occurred to me, too. I
just wasn’t sure about the cell phone: “Jill? Hi, I’m drowning in Irondequoit
Bay. Could you give me a hand? Oh, you’re sleeping?”
In reality, the ice is plenty strong, and the water
in this part of the bay is just four feet deep. It’s completely safe. As a kid,
I played hockey on much thinner Erie Canal ice, and occasionally somebody’s
skate would puncture the surface. But nobody ever died, which soothed my mind
on this day.
I’m watching two Webster outdoorsmen in their early
50s, Bob Gascon and Dave Bareis, ice fish. Gascon says he prefers standard
fishing, but ice fishing is a good way to pass the time, particularly when he
lives just down the street.
Gascon grabs his hand auger and easily drills a
6-inch-wide hole through the surface. I figured that would be a greater
challenge.
In fact, I had a few preconceived notions about
ice-fishing culture, partly gleaned from the movie Grumpy Old Men. I thought there would be numerous shanties out
there, protecting people from the elements. I thought the whisky and beer would
be flowing too.
But Gascon has no shelter except for a fluorescent
orange hunting suit, a hat, some serious-looking winter boots and gloves with
hand-warmer packets inside. He looks toasty. And he has a V-8 for later.
I could use a whisky right now.
It’s about 8:30 a.m. and I ask Gascon, “So, how long
do you usually do this for?”
Bareis cracks, “Until the bar opens.”
Evidently, the Bayside Pub just next door on Lake
Road opens around 11:30 a.m., and that’s when Gascon and Bareis plan to leave
the ice behind. The Bayside gets a healthy ice-fishing patronage for lunch.
Gascon says between late January and early February the restaurant sponsors an
ice-fishing derby that’s a family event filled with fish, food, and fun. It
sounds good to me.
I haven’t seen Gascon catch anything yet. He sits on
a self-warming seat cushion on the top of a plastic bucket, holding one pole
while monitoring another one sitting in a tip-up contraption.
The poles are much shorter than standard fishing
poles because people can’t cast out in ice fishing. A person drops his line
through the ice to the bottom and hopes for the best. There are lures and bait,
of course, to give an advantage over the fish, but they’re nothing extravagant.
Bareis’s brother comes over and shows us a box of new lures he brightly
painted. They are tiny, and I think, “Man, the huge fish on some of those ESPN
fishing shows would have no problem taking out one of those lures. Exactly how
big are the fish they’re getting here?”
Soon I find out. Gascon and Bareis catch perch,
about five to 10 inches long. They were nothing like the bass and trout I
envisioned before I came. But then I don’t know much about outdoor pursuits
such as this. I remember once talking to then-Bills backup quarterback Alex Van
Pelt about hunting with his teammates, and I admitted to him that I didn’t know
that much about it, to which he laughed and replied, “Yeah, that’s obvious.”
Look, I’m not Ted Nugent.
Bareis mentions that the day before, somebody walked
away with 48 perch from the Bay — apparently quite a haul. Gascon tells me
that perch has an excellent taste and that you can bake it, deep-fry it, do
just about anything to it, and it’s usually good. Bareis’s brother, for
instance, makes a delectable perch chowder. Gascon uses a Magic Vac to prepare
the perch for his freezer, and he’ll sometimes eat it up to eight months later.
But the guys don’t always take everything they
catch. Some perch are just too tiny. Gascon catches a five-incher, and throws
it back.
“That’s one I’ll get next year,” he says.
“They don’t learn from their mistakes, do they?” I
ask.
Bareis chimes in from about 10 feet away: “No, I’ll
probably catch that one over here now.”
My mind momentarily wanders. I think about the
thousands of years that man has fished, and wonder why evolution has never
written in the fish genetic code to watch out for lures and bait, when in just
50 years, viruses have apparently become stronger against our anti-bacterial measures.
Are viruses smarter than fish? Perhaps man, ever evolving, just stays one step
ahead of fish. But then viruses seem to stay one step ahead of man.
Hmmm. Ice fishing is so peaceful and contemplative,
I’m producing intensely creative thoughts. I ought to do this more often.
Rochesterian Rick Inzero, who’s ice-fished for more
than 30 years, says the sport is a great way to introduce fishing to kids
because they’re almost guaranteed to catch something. The sport is not costly,
he says. For under $50, a person could get started with a pole and a basic
tackle box. Beyond that, the biggest expenses would be warm clothing and an
auger, which is not even initially necessary because beginners could probably
use holes that other fishermen left behind minutes before. Inzero says they
typically don’t mind that.
People over 15 need to buy a fishing license at the
town clerk’s office or at a store with hunting and fishing gear. According to
the state department of environmental conservation, an annual license costs
$19.
Inzero says his favorite places to ice fish are
Irondequoit Bay, Braddock Bay in Greece, and the north end of Conesus Lake. He
also suggests Fairport Reservoirs in East Bloomfield, but non-residents must be
accompanied by at least one area resident. Of course, there are so many lakes
and bodies of water in the region, there are seemingly endless ice-fishing
possibilities.
So people should try it out. I’m glad I did. It
enabled me to conclude that viruses are the smartest living creatures of all, and
you just don’t arrive there by sitting in front of the tube.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.
