WASKISH, Minn. - Back in November when Mike Moore suggested that three of us Buckeyes head way up northwest Minnesota, almost to Manitoba/Ontario, to sample the ice fishing for walleye, it sounded like a great idea.
The prospects, after all, were too good for another wimpy winter and no big-lake ice fishing at all back in northwest Ohio. Which made Upper Red Lake here, with its again-plentiful walleye stock and some huge slab-sided crappies, seem the perfect antidote to cabin fever.
The place made good on its promise, and Minnesota ice fishing for walleye is just like that along western Lake Erie. Only different.
For one thing, you can count on the cold. It went as deep as 20-something below one night, plus a 20-something mph wind. But it would warm up to near zero by day. Earlier this month it was 38 below, without factoring in the wind-chill, and even the natives said it was a mite nippy, uncomfortably so, even though the feel-cold factor in the dry air is not as penetrating as northwest Ohio damp.
The mid-February ice here is 32 inches, thick enough for a semi if you want to drive one out. Four-by-four pickups and equipment trailers are no big deal. The ice fishing season, just like in Ohio, usually lasts around three and a half - except that means months, not weeks.
The booming, popping, groaning, and creaking of the ice, especially when amplified in the confines of a fish house, is an experience. It is like hearing, and feeling, a thunderstorm under and through your feet.
Indeed the whole trip to the wild and woolly North Country here - with its rolling spruce and birch forests and endless lakes, and its promise of moose and timber wolves - is an experience.
The shanties - fish houses - are equipped for 24/7 living, complete with inside john, stacked bunks for four anglers, LP-gas furnace and stovetop, and eight predrilled fishing holes. You just don't have to leave the ice. You won't miss the dawn/dusk prime-time "bites" because you do not have to leave.
In fact, you can even fish while you are tucked snugly inside your sleeping bag. You deploy a Rattle Reel, which is hung on a wall and looks like a spool of light, pliable electrical wire. You tie on a leader, and tiny teardrop spoon with a fathead minnow or golden shiner attached, drop it down near bottom, and forget it until it sounds off. A fish taking the bait makes the rig sound like someone shaking a baby rattle.
The state manages the eastern 48,000 acres of Upper Red. The Red Lake Band of the Chippewa tribe owns the rest and the connected lower Red Lake as well. In all, the Reds - like two mammoth, shallow dishpans joined like Siamese twins - cover 289,000 acres.
Through the mid 1990s, the tribe decimated the walleye fishery with gillnets, practically wiping it out. But nature abhors a vacuum, and by great good fortune - the locals call it just-right alignment of the sun, moon, planets, and stars - a terrific hatch of crappies occurred in 1995. That good fortune actually included about three weeks of uncharacteristically calm, mild weather during spawning season.
With no walleyes to prey on them, the crappies prospered and in recent years Upper Red was a mecca for 1995 fish, which now are 13-to-15-inch slabs of panfish delight. Sadly, the heavens did not realign in succeeding springs, not more crappie superclasses emerged, and that fishery eventually is expected to fade out.
The tribe and state began restocking walleyes, however, a few years after the collapse, and they thrived under a fishing closure that continued until last year. The tribe, moreover, has sworn off the gillnets and is sticking to hook and line, or perhaps limited trapnetting, all under biological quotas.
The aforementioned Moore, editor of the biweekly Ohio Outdoor News, his photographer-buddy Mike Mainhart, of Vienna, Ohio, near Youngstown, and yours truly made the Red Lake trip by invitation. It actually was the annual winter retreat for staff of the umbrella Outdoor News organization, which is based in Plymouth, Minn., and publishes in six states including Ohio (Moore) and Michigan.
We Buckeyes landed about 75 walleye in two days. Many of the fish were in a protected 17 to 26-inch slot and were released. But we easily filled two-fish limits for a Minnesota-style surf-and-turf dinner - fried, battered walleye fillets, and soy-marinated, bacon-wrapped mallard breasts on the grill. The latter were supplied by waterfowler Ron Nelson, of the Minnesota staff. Too good.
Nelson and staffer Aaron Geddis each managed a 14-inch crappie in their house - just to show it can be done, and to show the bragging slab-sizes that can be caught. With crappie, the fish come to you, or they don't.
Mainhart, never at a loss for colorful expressions, came up with three that summed up the adventure:
•"You know it's cold when the waitress is wearing insulated bib overalls." This was at a roadhouse, the Gosh Dam Place outside Deer River, which offers a breakfast that would do Paul Bunyan justice.
•"It's so cold I'm going to shoot me a seal and chew on some blubber when we get there." Well, we weren't that far north.
•"This is something else. It's like fishing in your living room." This was spoken while the blue-enameled coffee pot percolated and bubbled merrily, filling the "shanty" with its bracing, warming aroma. The wind howled outside, but all was fine with the world inside. Any minute the big reel would be rattling.
Coming Tuesday: Getting there is half the fun, or not.
First Published February 18, 2007, 11:53 a.m.
