A Fish(less) Story

It’s just before sunrise on a frigid February Sunday morning, and I’m standing on a frozen lake. It’s still dark, although the sun is starting to make its way up and out over the trees behind me. My guide for the morning, Ben Nugent, a thirty year-old biologist for Fish and Game, finishes pulling his sled, packed with the tools we’ll need for a day of ice fishing. I met Ben about twenty minutes ago, right near Mosquito Bridge outside Tilton. The first thing he said to me was, “This is the coldest morning I’ve fished this year,” and now, standing in the middle of Lake Winnisquam, wearing six layers of clothes, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks and foot warmers inside my boots, I believe him. The cold takes my breath away, reminding me that it sure was warm in my bed about an hour ago, where I still could be, snug and cozy as I dream of soft tropical breezes and warm sand between my toes.
My imaginary vacation is interrupted by the whine of the gas-powered ice augur that Ben’s man-handling as he drills a hole into the ice. Water gushes out as Ben kicks the slush and ice away and drills another hole. My guess is that the fundamentals of ice fishing haven’t changed much since our ancestors realized that salted squirrel meat gets pretty tired around mid January. You cut a hole in the ice, you bait a hook, you drop the hook into the hole, and you wait. A few days before Ben cautioned me that even though he’s picked out a sure-fire winning spot for us, “There are no guarantees” we’ll catch anything, but as I watch him set up the shelter and cut the bait, I have a feeling I’m in the hands of a pro, and if I can prevent myself from freezing to death or falling through the ice, I might just be eating fish for dinner tonight.
I’m not much of a fisherman. To-date, my greatest achievement as an angler is getting a three-pronged lure stuck in my ten-year old belly while yanking it from a sunken log only to be followed twelve years later by a mid-river mishap in Montana when I learned that fly fishing waders filled with gallons of Bighorn River water make for a hilarious, near-lethal combination. And prior to today, the thought of ice fishing reminded me only of the joke about how the ice fisherman died (he got himself run over by the Zamboni), but with thousands of fishable bodies of water across New Hampshire, I decided it was time to hit the ice and see what the frigid fuss was all about.
Ben’s from northern New Hampshire, and after two years of college, he abandoned his plan of becoming a pharmacist. “A life under fluorescent lights was not for me,” he adds as he divvies up the sucker meat. Ben is a conservation biologist for New Hampshire Fish and Game. “My job is to look for and study endangered fish populations for the state and help towns make good decisions about how to protect them,” Ben explains. And when he says things like, “Trawlin’ on Winni,” and “Jigging for lakers,” he says them with such casual conviction that I’m convinced this man knows more about fish and fishing than I could ever hope to. Besides, anyone who utters the sentence, “Black crappie makes great eating,” with a straight face deserves my respect.
We’re now seated in the temporary shelter – sort of a bob house on the fly. The thick plywood base has two hatches in the floor, and Ben’s positioned them just above the holes he’s drilled. He then unveils his baby, or as he calls it, “My $350 fishing buddy,” a state-of-the-art depth and fish finder. Ben drops the cable sensor down the hole, and we see how deep the water is and where the fish are. “Without this, you’re fishing blind,” he says, which sums up every attempt I’ve ever had at fishing until today.
Ben hands me a small rod with a simple lure and a piece of sucker meat on it. I watch as he cuts more of the meat and puts it into what looks like a small copper bell at the end of another rod. “It’s time to chum the holes,” he explains as he puts three or four pieces of bait into the bell, latches the bottom and drops it into my hole. Ben tells me that it’s a chum bucket, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve heard that term before, but only during Spongebob Squarepants, drawing even greater attention to the fact I’ve got lots to learn.
We watch the bucket descend on the depth finder’s small screen, and just as it reaches fifty-five feet and the bottom, Ben yanks the line to release the bucket’s bottom to let the chum fall to the floor. Our target today is lake trout, a robust species that’s found in most lakes across the state. I learn that any trout we keep has to be at least eighteen inches long and that trout love smelt. Ben waxes poetic about the smelt, about how they’re key to the health of the larger fish in the lake. “The trout and the salmon eat smelt, so we need smelt for the other fish to thrive,” Ben tells me. I had no idea how important smelt were to the entire operation, and Ben continues, telling me the smelt population in Lake Winnisquam is healthy and plentiful. I think we’ve dumped enough of it at the bottom of our holes to host a trout-only, all-you-can-eat “smeltasbord,” but so far, the fish ignore us.
Ben’s fish finder shows nothing except our lines in the water and an occasional fish or two. We’ve been out here for about two hours already and nothing’s biting except the cold air. Ben suggests that the chum left behind by the bob house owners in the distance might have helped our trout lose their appetites or that last weekend’s fishing derby may have played a role. Either way, we’re having no luck, and Ben decides to find a new spot. Within minutes he’s drilled two new holes, and we’re soon seated in our cozy shelter, rods in hand, and fresh chum down the holes.
One thing I can tell you about ice fishing when the fish aren’t biting is that you spend a lot of time talking about other things. Ben saw John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett at the Capitol Theater last weekend, and I really liked George Clooney in the film, Michael Clayton. The sub-prime housing market issue is a big problem, and the New York Mets will play their last season at Shea this summer. I once saw an otter in the lake when I was a kid, and did you know that otters will eat only the eyes and brains of salmon that are caught in Fish and Game’s nets? We talk Red Sox, mink, bald eagles and fish. We discuss the state of fishing on Winnipesaukee (great) and the future of the Bridal Shiner (not great). We talk about how ugly the cusk is and about how last summer a renegade pickerel in Merrimack nipped at campers’ feet as they swam, and that the Round White is a very rare fish in New Hampshire and lives only in Newfound Lake.
“We might get skunked today,” Ben laments. We try another strategy and go back to the original holes and bait a hook on a “tip up,” a contraption that sits over the hole with a baited line at the end and a flag that snaps up the moment there’s any tug on the line. Ben sets it, and we head back to our holes.
It’s around 10 AM and we’ve been out here for four hours. Just then, Ben sees the raised flag on the tip up, and we jog over to see what we’ve caught. Ben can’t believe it – the flag’s up but there’s nothing on the end of our line, just remnants of the sucker meat. Apparently we’re the only suckers out here today. Back in the shelter, our time running out, we even try dumping the carcass of the sucker fish Ben filleted last night to entice our recalcitrant foes, but it’s frozen, and the sucker’s head bobs on the surface of my hole, its dead eyes staring through me, mocking my incompetence.
Just before we quit, we’ve fallen back into silence when Ben murmurs, “You’ve got a lake trout right underneath you.” I reel the bait gently upward, hoping the fish will forget the free food we gave him and attack my strings-attached snack. But he’s too smart, too full or too jaded for my shenanigans, and he swims away, leaving us fishless.
You might call five hours sitting on a block of ice in the frigid winter air with no fish to show for it the definition of failure, but I’m not so sure. How often do you get to learn all sorts of things from a man who’s an expert in his field and have fun doing it? And there are worse places to spend a Sunday morning than in the great outdoors. Besides, what’s a little frostbite among new fishing buddies?