True story! Quantities may be changed to protect the guilty.

I am a country boy through and through! My favorite sound is no sound at all! I grew up where you could not see any houses from our house. Well there was one you could see when they had a light on and that, only innhe winter when the leaves were off of the trees!

Well the people who lived in that house were city folks who had a huge 4000 square foot apartment in Manhattan, New York City.

Photos courtesy of Tupper Lake )

The night before this fishing trip occurred I was speaking with Bruce “The City Slicker Dude”. Told him I was going ice fishing and he asked if he could come. He had never been fishing before!

Well I agreed to take him. I. Had 5 tipups, some minnows (or minners as they call them in the south). I had an 8 inch auger. I believe at the time we were allowed 15 pickerel each. I was 17, Bruce was much older!

I had been telling Bruce that many times fishing is waiting and more waiting. Fishing was a sport of patience. We were fishing in a State Forest. There was a pond not too far from our houses at an old abandoned camp! (Sounds like a setting for one of those axe murder movies). 

We drove some and then hiked a little way up to rhe pond. I augered a hole, hooked a live minnow and set one tip up. I moved over about 15 feet and began to drill another hole. The ice was about 12 inches thick. I was only half way and the tipup tripped. “There is no way”, I thought to myself! I went to check and sure enough a nice pickerel! I through the fish into the 10 inches of snow near the edge of the pond, set up the first rig with a new minnow and went back to augering. I still had not broken through on the second hole and the flag went up again on the first hole. Another fish!

I had 5 tipups with me and I was determined to get them all in. But I never got the 5th one in. We pulled so many pickerel out and they were all beauties.  Along the edge of the pond, you could see fish everywhere. We were just pulling them out and slinging the fish into the snow. Bruces wife, kept bringing us coffee and donuts and leaving with fish. In less than 3 hours we had caught almost 60 pickerel. The entire time I am telling Bruce this is not normal. But for him, it was his first time fishing. Even today, he probably thinks fishing is normally like that.

So we took our limit of 30 fish home! (Numbers changed to protect the guilty).

 

Thank you and God bless! Daddy William