The ice Breaking
Josh Gunderson is a student at St. John’s University and goes back to school on Monday. Faced with his final hours of freedom this weekend, the 23-year-old Austin native chose to brave the frigid temperatures and do something he’s loved doing since before he even started kindergarten: Ice fishing.
“I’ve always been a fisherman,” said Gunderson, whose family owns a cabin next to French Lake near Faribault. “It’s hard to explain. There’s a lot of camaraderie out here. You come out and talk to guys and find out where the fish are at. It’s just relaxing, you get away from a few things and don’t think about work.”
Gunderson arrived at French Lake mid-morning Saturday and started drilling holes in the ice while waiting for his brother to show up with an ice house. Nor was Gunderson alone. Dozens of fellow fishing enthusiasts hunkered down for the day at the lake, even though catching fish didn’t always appear to be the sole focus.
“(I enjoy) just the nice, calm peace and quiet — and the occasional fish,” Pat Stahly of Northfield said. Then he laughed. “Catching fish is probably the second priority,” he said.
Another veteran ice fisherman, Darrin Krueger of Faribault, echoed that sentiment.
“Your odds (of catching something) are better fishing in a boat than an ice shack,” Krueger said. “But it beats sitting in the house.”
Krueger and fishing partner Anne Cornelius arrived at around 7:30 a.m., although Krueger noted usually they’d be out on the ice at 5:30 a.m. because fish tend to feed early in the morning.
Some with larger ice houses, Cornelius noted, will even spend the night on the lake.
Krueger and Cornelius did their fishing from a smaller ice house equipped with the essentials: a heater and a Luggable Loo. Krueger also brought along a Humminbird Ice machine, a device that provides depth measurements.
“There are so many different things you can buy for ice fishing it’s unreal, just unreal,” Krueger said.
But he and Cornelius don’t consider themselves especially dedicated to ice fishing.
“There are some guys that’ll walk out on three inches of ice,” Krueger said. “Those are the dedicated ones. Crazy ones, but they’re dedicated ones. They live for ice fishing.”
Stahly, a lifelong fisherman who only took up ice fishing several years ago, said he won’t walk out on a lake until it has at least six inches of ice on it. He won’t drive his vehicle out until a lake is covered by 18 inches of ice.
But beyond being a stickler for safety, Stahly didn’t sound especially concerned Saturday with the intricate details of actually fishing. He jokingly described himself as a “lazy fisher.”
“We’ve been hearing that the fish are down deep, about 27 feet,” he said, surveying the scene. “What we should have done was drill the hole and check the depth, but we didn’t do that (today). We just put our shacks up. We’re just going to go for it.
“The smart guys will drill and fish and they’ll drill and fish, and keep moving. You’ve got to go find the fish, but I don’t usually do that. I just drill holes and sit and hope the fish come to me.”
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