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 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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment