Ahoy thar fishes!

Naughty me. It's been a whole week since I dropped by. I really should have brought wine in apology, or at least a treat to go with the morning coffee. Schade, I've neglected that too. 


Shall I just plough on and explain my absence? I don't have a good explanation, really. I blame the ice fishing. It's an annual tradition. We gather the troops, drive an hour north of Toronto, and then drive over Lake Simcoe to party it up and then nurse hangovers in the ice-fishing huts the next day. At least, that's how it usually goes. We weren't quite game enough to drive our own cars over the ice this year though, what with the unseasonable warmth and the patches of watery-looking ice near the edges, so we hopped a lift in the back of a ute. All else went as per usual though. Hangovers were highly successful. The fish could smell us a mile off, I swear. Well, that's my excuse for not catching anything...

The fishing huts

The trick with ice fishing, the thing that no-one tells you, is how very, very dull it is for 98% of the time. Unless you bring lots of snacks, some drinks, and maybe a frisbee. That doesn't help the fishing, but at least it fills in that 98%. A quick run-down: 
The tools: A paint stick, with some fishing line wrapped around it and a hook of some sort attached. 
The bait: Some wary looking minnows, swimming round and round a bucket. The clever ones dive to the bottom whenever a hand comes near, leaving the losers at the top to be impaled on the hooks.
The process: Put minnow on hook. Drop minnow into water through hole carved in ice. Either a) watch minnow swim to freedom because you didn't impale it properly, or b) watch minnow hang about and slowly get less active (i.e. more dead). Suspect you feel a nibble. Tug vehemently on paint stick. Dislodge some lake weed. 
Repeat.

Perch-eye-view of the action

There were some fish down there. We caught a couple of them, dragged them up to say hi, and then sent them back into the water. The rest just gorged themselves on minnows and waited for us to drop down the next course. Clever buggers.