Bil Marchel: Sometimes, the trip is the adventure, not the fishing

Just mention the words "ice fishing" and many people cringe.

Those words suggest a motionless human figure far out on a frozen, windswept lake, a poor soul whose butt is planted on an overturned plastic pail. We visualize this person staring with watery eyes at a void in the ice where a bobber sits motionless -- as it has been for some time -- in the now glazed-over hole.

Last week Lindy Frasl of Fort Ripley, Minn., and I employed a more modern -- and thus more comfortable -- method of ice fishing: We hitched his wheeled fish house -- a nifty rig Lindy built himself -- to his pickup truck and drove onto the ice of a Brainerd-area lake.

A day earlier, Lindy had left a message on my answering machine.

"I got a tip on a hot crappie bite," he said. "Give me a call."

Lindy had fished the lake a decade or so ago, and as we drove toward our destination, he told me he and a few friends had caught limits of nice crappies on that previous trip.

"The lake is hard to find," Lindy said. "It's way back in on a logging road. I think I remember how to get there. I know the road goes down a steep hill to the lake."

We made a few wrong turns, but eventually, through the aspen forest, we spotted the frozen lake. And Lindy was right; there was a steep hill going down to the lake, and the road was icy and deeply rutted. We half-slid down the hill and onto the ice.

Recent cold weather has pretty much alleviated the slush problems that plagued anglers earlier in the season, and since the last major snowfall was in early December, travel atop the ice has been easy. We had driven several hundred yards when Lindy exclaimed, "This is the spot."

Two days earlier, Old Man Winter had unleashed his wrath, a combination of wind and cold that had kept all but the hardiest of humans indoors. But now it was decent day for early February -- overcast with a slight wind, and about 10 degrees.

It took only a few minutes for us to unhook and lower Lindy's fish house to the ice. Lindy drilled the holes while I scooped the slush from the columns in the ice. Eventually, the propane stove was lit, electric lights were glowing, and jackets and gloves were shed.

Lindy and I would tempt the crappies using small jigs on which we would impale a crappie minnow. My ice fishing tackle box contained various shapes and colors of jigs, some of which glow when exposed to a light. The tiny jigs have catchy names such as Rat Finky and Fat Boy. I tied a lime green jig to one line, a pink jig on the other.

It wasn't long before fish started to show on our locators. To Lindy and me, half the fun of ice fishing is watching the locator light up when a fish appears, first green, then orange as the fish moves closer, and finally red. Then, hopefully, a bite.

Hopefully.

The first few fish that appeared on the screens ignored our offerings. We tried our usual repertoire of tricks. Sometimes they'll bite if you slowly lower the jig to them, and often they'll hit it if you take it away a few times. We also tried to jiggle the bait in place for a few seconds, then let it sit still.

Finally, I felt a tap, set the hook and pulled a small crappie through the hole in the ice. I released the fish. Later, I caught another crappie -- this one a keeper -- and Lindy eventually caught one of his own. But that was it. Fishing started slowly and then, well, tapered off. We called it quits about 8 p.m., the two crappies looking a bit lonely in the bottom of a pail.

But our adventure wasn't quite over. As we left the lake and attempted to drive up the rutted, icy hill, Lindy's truck lost traction. When he attempted to back down, the wheeled fish house jack-knifed off the trail into deep snow. Now we could not continue up the hill because of the slick road and could not go backward because of the jack-knifed trailer.

Eventually, using a bar for leverage, the two of us were able to lift and slide the trailer a few inches at a time until it was back on the road. We then backed the rig onto the lake far enough to get a good run at the hill. It was a rough ride, bouncing and banging, but that time we made it to the top.

"Now we have something to talk about next time we fish," I said as we drove down the snowy trail.

Wildlife photographer and outdoors writer Bill Marchel lives near Brainerd. bill@billmarchel.com