ON FISH LAKE _ Fernando Duran had patiently fished most of the afternoon without any strikes when, just after sunset, a couple of nice crappies finally bit his tiny jig.
"They'll make a meal," said Duran, an avid ice angler.
They were typical Fish Lake crappies, maybe 10-11 inches. Not trophies, but not bad for the second ice trip of the year.
"I had the day off so I thought, why not? Give it a try ... Not bad," Duran said before he packed up his gear to head off the lake as dark set in.
Not bad at all.
A hundred or so yards away from Duran, Matt Lepak was using needle-nose pliers to extract a hook from the mouth of a small northern pike that Beau Hughes was holding steady between his feet. The fish grabbed a minnow under a tip-up about 30 feet outside their shelter.
"I kind of tripped trying to get out of the shelter to get to this guy. I was a little excited," Lepak said as he freed the hook for the toothy mouth.
The fish would be kept, Lepak proclaimed, to be pickled.
"We eat them," he said of the sometimes spurned fish.
Lepak and Hughes, both of Duluth, were joined by Matt Sipola of Virginia and Brad Warren of Morehead, jigging in a big Clam shelter and alternating checking the tip-ups outside. By sunset they had caught a couple northern and a few crappies since arriving at 11 a.m.
"We're too lazy to move," Lepak said with a laugh. "But we're having fun."
Sipola had the hot hand of the afternoon, if you can call three crappies "hot." His little green jig tipped with just the head of a tiny minnow was producing when other offerings were not.
"They're jealous," Sipola said of his jeering friends.
Not far from the group of four, Jerry Tanski was also fishing for crappies, but with little luck. That didn't seem to bother Tanski, who was enjoying a day off outdoors.
"They're being kind of finicky today," Tanski said of the fish. "They come in to look but they don't bite."
Just as Tanski left for the day, Tim Morse showed up, drilled a few holes and was testing his Garmin side-scanning fishfinder. The unit can "see" fish out to 80 feet to the side of the hole. Even in downward scanning mode the cone is a whopping 20 feet wide in 20 feet of water, showing much more than you'd see with a normal flasher.
"What's interesting with this is that you know what's down there, or what's not. ... You see how few fish there really are around," Morse said as he rotated the transducer so see what was near his hole, all while jigging a tiny lure. "With the usual flasher you don't know if there's one fish down there or 100 or none nearby. So this is kind of cool."
Morse had fished about an hour, occasionally changing holes to see if the fish his finder was showing would bite. As twilight fell into night, they had not cooperated.
"You can see them down there," he said. '"But it still doesn't make them bite."
As the last light dimmed the warmth of the day was giving way to a chill, so Morse flipped-up his shelter to brace against the breeze.
"I'm going to stick it out a while," he said as a visitor walked toward shore a quarter-mile away.
Early reports vary, warm temps have slowed ice
Across the Northland it's been an early start to ice fishing season this year, with some folks testing unsafe ice in November but plenty of people out in early December as the ice firmed-up.
On parts of Fish Lake just north of Duluth there was a solid 8-10 inches of clear ice on a mild evening last week. That probably hasn't changed much with the recent warm daily temperatures, but it's enough for walking or small ATVs and snowmobiles _ in some areas. It's definitely not enough ice yet for most cars and trucks.
Anglers have been hitting Fish, Rice, Boulder and back bays of Island Lake hard over the past 10 days or so, with mixed success.
Back bays of the lower St. Louis River are producing crappies and walleyes, including some big fish. But harbor waters are still sketchy, with conflicting reports on ice safety. While there appears to be clear, solid ice in some areas holding fast to shore, it's also known to break up in warmer temperatures, with ship traffic and with big wind events that push lake water into the harbor.
Farther north, commercial operations have been shuttling customers out onto Red Lake and Lake of the Woods where the walleye bites have been reported as active, typical of early ice. Large ATVs were being used in some areas with larger vehicles operating on northern portions of Lake of the Woods.
