no longer at ease: desperate ice fishing day

This from a couple of weeks back, mid-March or so.

I've never been any kind of ice fishing enthusiast. This year the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers hosted a guided trip on this high lake, with the agenda of getting more people interested in the self-sustaining brown trout population. Since Covid the spawning browns in the feeder streams have been hit hard, with a number of 20-27" trophies taken out of the breeding stock. We're trying to get new regulations to protect these fish.

The guide said usually the ice is getting thinner by late March, this year it's still getting thicker. Fortunately it's still just under 3 feet so our augers can reach the water. Up on the Grand Mesa there's 5 feet of ice on the lakes..

I wandered around the encampment asking questions as is my wont. Paul kindly invited me to fish with them. Three of us are then lined up sitting on buckets, staring at holes in the ice. Patricia pipes up, "I keep thinking of Grumpy Old Men". Not sure how Paul and I felt about that..

There wasn't much happening in the encampment, a few small trout. Paul has a nice simple Humminbird ice fishing sonar, could see the jig falling on its circular LED display. The guides had high-fancy sonars which they said work about 50% of the time, took him a year to learn. Both of these sonars agreed there might be fish down there though our sampling did not support that.

We walked 10min toward shore for another spot. There were holes pre-drilled there and some blood in the snow which we took for a hopeful sign. Action was faster here though still just the smaller stocked cuttbows. Apparently CPW stocks the lake through the ice - drives the truck out, uses a giant truck-mounted auger to drill a hole, and dumps the unfortunate trouts into the icy wastes. I'm startled the fish survive. There's a decent population of mysis shrimp here which I guess is what they are eating.

51 years of fishing to get my first fish through the ice..

We were hoping for an Artic char, Colorado state record 4.7lb caught in this lake, or some kokanee salmon, or one of those legendary browns. None of that happened. The odd thing about ice fishing is you can't really think about it - there's no hatch to match, no fly presentation to think about, no difficult casts to holding spots - just drowning some mealworms on jig hooks, or hopefully jigging small spoons for the predators. Even the tackle is boring, short little bits of graphite rods and cheap spinning reels. Still with 3 feet of ice, it's the only game in town..

I used inappropriate tackle, a refurbished Abu Ambassadeur 4600C on an ultralight fiberglass stream rod which is really too long for ice fishing.

There's a fox making a living off what the ice fishermen leave behind. He came trotting across the ice to check if we'd left him a nice pile of fish guts. Sadly no.