baby, it's cold outside

I won’t profess to be an ice fisherman. But I’ve gotten drunk in a shanty before.
It’s a dangerous thing, getting drunk while fishing in 10-degree weather. You shut the door, get a small stove going and sit on ice thick enough to drive a semi over, and the augered-out hole, which seems to keep freezing itself shut around your line, is your only hope of catching fish that rightfully should be hibernating or at least taking a good midwinter’s snooze. By the time you have to take a leak outside, the sun has dropped, you can’t see the bank and you’re in no condition to drive, even if there’s no other car or shanty on the lake.
So, in essence, you’re freezing your tail off and getting drunk when you could be getting perfectly shnockered from the comfort of your couch, maybe even watching the game with a Quarter Pounder in the hand opposite your beer.
Ice fishing is sort of like working out on an exercise machine — you know, a rowing machine, a treadmill, a stair-stepper... I’ve tried most of them. It’s too cold out, or too dark, or too windy, or too what have you, so I’ll usually end up getting on a pair of shorts and sneakers and pressing a couple of buttons to begin the monotony of waiting for a new beep or light to flash. By the time I’m 10 minutes into the workout, I’ve given up, thrown on a sweatshirt, hat and gloves and gone outside to do the real thing. In short, I’d rather run outside, row outside or climb outside than stare at a 2-inch screen for an hour (or, let’s be honest, less).
So, fishing in the cold? Bring it on. Actually, I’m the guy on the trip who will spite the weather and fish, or kayak or do whatever it is the inclement weather is trying to get me to stop doing.
"C’mon, we’ll use English sinkers," I’ve been known to say in 40-knot winds on the Outer Banks in November. Or, "We can paddle through this," leaving the beach in high surf on a kayak. Or, "What’s the difference if it’s 10 below or 50 below? Cold is cold! Let’s go, Sally!”
Yep, that’s me. Which is really funny because deep down, I’m pretty much a wimp. You can ask my wife. Except when I’m doing these things. I fret about bears before hiking, sharks before swimming, snakes before running the hidden trails. I once hopped a copperhead I swore was as dead as lunch. I later found out, and luckily not the hard way, that these things more or less can sit pretty still. It’s a good little trick. I wouldn’t have even ran the trail had I known it would contain slick snakes.
And I once ran a trail being chased by a wild hog. I thought the damned thing was a deer until it started taking out small trees in the path between it and me. I never ran so fast in my life. I’m pretty sure I was on pace to break the 4-minute mile...
Again, wouldn’t have done it if someone told me there were wild boars.
And there was that ugly barracuda who surfaced right behind me while standing in the Florida surf; I could have reached out and counted its scales. By the time I heard the splash, I caught a glimpse of the enormous fish, his eye like a coffee saucer, crazy and stinky.
In fact, my wife and I used to swim with the sharks off St. Pete Beach in Florida. We’d get out of work, get on our goggles and swimsuits and log a mile or so in waist-deep water. We’d be swimming then, bonk! Something would brush by your leg. It was something pretty large, pretty meaty. Something that could definitely knock you over. Of course, at the time, we didn’t really know that sundown was feeding time for most fish, and mostly sharks. At least not till we skipped an evening swim, but caught the local news. The traffic helicopter took a turn over the beach — our beach — and showed the water out to the breakers from above, where we swim. At first, we thought all the black spots in the water were just deep pockets and, you know, shadows of clouds or something. No, they were sharks. And there were hundreds of them.
I’ll never forget the look on Robyn’s face when the anchor noted that at this time of the day, you’re always within 3 feet of a shark. Which means stand in the water and reach out your arm... (Certainly, I’m not condoning that.)
I’ll never do that again.
So ice fishing isn’t really so much, what they used to call, extreme; fishing in the cold is.
That’s why on April 1, 1990 — the beginning of trout season in the New York Adirondack Park Wilderness Area — I was out in my waders with a 5-weight fly rod wondering what fly would best mimic whatever possibly could be active in 35-degree weather.
Of course, there were no bugs on the mighty Saranac River. There might not be any until May or August. Why I skipped my college classes that day and drove out more than an hour to fish on a half-frozen river, I’ll never really remember, except that if I had to guess, I’d bet on being able to say, well, I fished opening day.
But there I was anyway, ski parka, waders, ski hat, Gore-Tex gloves, casting what looked like a small ball of black yarn entombed in ice into frigid water 3 feet higher than it would be in a couple of months.
And I remember it feeling pretty good. I thought I would tell my English lit professor that while he was pontificating about "Moby Dick," I was living it.
Then I remember thinking that I wouldn’t live to tell the story: Just as my mind was drifting as it so often does when I’m at the good end of a fly line, I felt a bump, not unlike the shark, at about hip level. By the time I had looked at what was bumping me, I realized I was about to be taken out by an ice drift the size of a Buick LeSabre. The old kind.
My initial thought was to go underwater and let it pass. That was stupid, and I’m glad I didn’t trust my instincts. The second was to give the ice my best Hong Kong Phooey karate chop.
I did, and the tip of the iceberg miraculously broke off. Which was just enough to allow me a quickly deteriorating gap between the Goliath and the river bank.
I took a couple more steps toward the bank, and the ice sheet hit me with a convincing thud. I wasn’t enough to stop it, so naturally it won, but it wedged me clear into the bank, which, I suppose, was better than into icy the depths, and I only went under to not-quite-shoulder level. I was pinned momentarily, and still had a hold of my rod, a Fenwick, if I recall, and found that even big things with velocity on their side, such as river ice, can change directions if you push hard enough or your bones don’t all break apart.
I lumbered out of the river already shivering when I got into my Subaru — the passenger side — shedding clothes like a nerd with a drunken cheerleader. I wrapped up in an emergency parka and a pair of ski pants that I kept in the hatchback (for occasions such as this?) along with a little shovel and ice scraper, and opened the Thermos of coffee while waiting for the heater to warm up.
The near-death experience, if you can call it that, really made the trip worthwhile. Plus it gave me a good story to tell for a few days and a chance to eat bad food and drink lots of beer to comfort myself.
It beats sitting in an ice shanty, anyway.
I also remember the cold front that blew in November, 2005, off of Buxton, N.C., in an area most people know as the Outer Banks or simply, OBX. That front reached BJ and I the first night we drove into town. We were all rigged up for surf casting, and we’d not only brought a steamer trunk full of warm clothes, we actually hoped for severe weather like this.
Of course, we walked out to the beach behind the roach motel we were staying in, as it was too late to fish for the day. It was dark, and the air was frigid — maybe 40 degrees and dropping fast. So, we provisioned up, got drunk, played mini golf in the motel room, and woke up at 5 a.m. to a think blanket of snow and salty ice that you needed a chisel and hammer to break off your windshield.
We, instead, heated up the SUV, and simply waited for it to defrost as we got into our warmest gear. The checklist goes a little something like this:
• Neoprine bib waders
• Long johns
• Blue jeans
• Wool socks (the real kind, which, for some reason, are hard to find in the South)
• Three levels of long-sleeved shirt, the first insulated, the second a T-shirt that says "Stinky’s Bait" or something, and a turtleneck
• Waxed canvas Carhartt hunting jacket with hood
• Ski hat
• Neoprine gloves
• Sunglasses (for later, and not for the sun, but for the pelting snow and sand)
• Bandanna (ditto)
We looked like mummies walking onto the beach. But we were there, dammit. In one hand, screaming-hot coffee, and in the other, a surf rod handle, connected to a 10-foot pole, connected to an oversized reel, connected to 20-pound test line, connected to a drum rig (two hooks, a 4-ounce triangle sinker) connected to about an ounce of fresh mullet from the Red Drum Tackle Shop.
For a few hours, we didn’t catch shit. There was the occasional bluefish, and we caught a random sheepshead. BJ got into a puppy drum, but it was an inch or two under size, so, despite that we thought we wouldn’t be eating fish for dinner that night, assuming at least one of us wouldn’t be in the hospital getting a frost-bitten toe lopped off and eating unidentifiable hospital food with a hangover, he threw it back.
Now, the sleet hadn’t exactly stopped pelting our faces throughout the morning, but we kept on until lunchtime. BJ is a big guy, about 6-foot, 8-inches in his boot-foot waders, and he’s got about 100 pounds on me. He can block the wind like no one I’ve seen. But he gets hungry, and I do my best to keep up with him. The problem was that we had a great fishing spot, and the rule on the beach is simple: You don’t give it up. So one guy gets lunch and the other guy mans the poles.
I stayed in the elements and he drove into town.
When he came back, he had two things ... well three: two extra-cheese pizzas and a bag of artificial bloodworms.
While eating the pizza — which was the best I’ve ever had in my life, of course — BJ that he went over to the bait shop and pleaded with the owner to give him something that would catch fish in the late November snow.
It sounded easy enough: artificial bloodworm on the end of a light 7-foot pole. Two hooks, a 1-once weight. "Sit back and have fun," the guy said.
The only fish that would hit something that small in the surf was whiting. But we didn’t care. Hell, whiting are tasty, even if they’re in the 12-inch range, which they were, and we slayed them. We were catching them two at a time. They were hopping out of the snowy surf as if they hadn’t eaten in months. And the bubble gum-like bloodworm usually stayed intact once you pulled it from the tiny jaws, so you didn’t really have to re-bait with each fish.
By the end of the day, our sides were split from laughing from catching fish every 13.4 seconds, we were good and drunk (at some point, you stop feeling the cold. Again, I’m not condoning) and we had a Coleman cooler full of fish.
We laughed all the way back to the motel and began gutting the fish at the sink. Our hands were still numb, and I remember thinking that the beer was just slightly colder than the fish.
Later, BJ fired up a vat of oil, breaded the whiting in his famous catfish batter (he’s a Missouri boy, so he knows how to bread a fish), and along with some hushpuppies and a small salad (to keep us regular), we feasted on some of the sweetest, most tender fish in the ocean.
We smiled thinking that there were still two days of icy-cold fishing ahead of us.
While we had enjoyed some of the best fishing and best times out on the banks, others were huddled safely in their homes or the local movie theater, waiting for the sun..
The waders and our clothes were drying nicely over the baseboard heaters cranked all the way up to 95, there was plenty of beer in the cooler and, besides, we still had the mini golf set.