Saturday, January 31, 2009

1/31/09 Smelting!

I did it! I finally got to go ice fishing!! Alan, one of the wonderful custodians in the Education Center is quite the outdoorsman and he and his wife took me ice fishing.

First thing to know: there is more than one kind of ice fishing. Today we are smelting which is fishing for smelt (a kind of fish). The ice that we're fishing through is on a river and smelt are a salt water fish. You fish during the tides on the river! So much to learn!!!

We met at the Park 'n Ride in New Sharon. On a Saturday morning at 8am there were already 2 cars: mine and someone else's. Good thing I got there at 8 'cuz there are only 7 parking spaces at this Park 'n Ride. ;-)

We drove about 90 minutes to Bowdoinham to fish on the Cathance River. We had to take the toll road. The signs said it was $1.00 but it was really only still $0.60. Tomorrow the rates go up but today the signs are already up.

Here we are at "the camp". (Yes, this means that there is yet another meaning to the word "camp.") Note that there are cars here from New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York. This must be quite the sport!

We cross the road from the parking lot to go to where the ice shacks are located. Yes, those shacks are sitting on the frozen river and they have no floors and have holes cut in the ice inside each one, yet they don't sink or break the ice. Wow. One of these (#17) is going to be our home for the next 5 hours.

1 comment:

DavidL said...

Smelting! I haven't been smelting since I moved away from the U.P.! We typically fished for smelt along the rivers that emptied into Lake Michigan and we used nets to catch the fish. Tradition held that you were supposed to bite the head off of the first smelt that you caught.