Ice Fishing in Spring Lake, Minnesota

Ice Fishing in Spring Lake, Minnesota

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for February 6, 2016

On Friday night, our good friends the Zitzewitz Family and Troy Brown came over for a hot tub party and some snacks.  Not necessarily in that order.

On Saturday, we ventured out on to Spring Lake to do some ice fishing.  I always get nervous driving on the ice no matter how many trucks I see out in front of us or how thick they tell me the ice is.  Just the thought of being in a vehicle that suddenly fell through the ice into freezing cold water is enough to give me pause.  But we put our irrational fears behind us and charged forward.

Our good friend Dan Walters has access to a friend's cabin, so we asked him if we could tag along with him some time and he was happy to oblige.  I didn't get a chance to ask him what was the significance of a green door on an ice house was, but I'm sure it means something pretty crazy.

It was nice and cozy inside the ice house thanks to the handy stove on the wall.  We took off our coats and settled in to catch some monsters.

I kept looking down the holes to catch a glimpse of some of the monsters as they swam by, but I didn't see any.  It was kind of fun seeing the minnows we were using for bait swim by the holes from time to time, though.

Turns out we didn't have much luck catching monsters, although this perch put up quite the fight as we strained to pull him out of the hole.

After awhile, I found myself wandering around outside to see if anyone else was having any luck.  I couldn't hear any screams of delight from this distance so I assumed every was having a slow day.

We did spot a couple of bald eagles sitting on a nearby tree which was really cool.  I love watching bald eagles.  I wish we had caught more fish so I could have offered them some of our catch.

I went home for awhile and felt guilty that the dogs didn't get to join us ice fishing so I took them for a walk on Prior Lake.  They seemed to like that.

Jen and Dan came to pick us up again later in the evening so we could take Luke ice fishing.  He had never done it before and wanted to give it a shot.

He didn't catch anything, but I thought he held his pole real well.

Sheri also did a good job with the pole, but again No fish.  It turns out the Swank Family isn't very good at ice fishing, but we still had a bunch of fun doing it.

We brought along our new 360Fly 4K video camera. Since it's water proof, I asked Dan to stick it down in the ice hole to discover what we'd see. I thought the results were pretty cool. Even after Dan had a cramp and dropped my new camera!