Slot Size

I never was one to enjoy hard-water fishing. First, you cannot cast or troll a lure around the lake. Sitting in one place waiting for a fish to swim by just doesn’t make sense to me, unless you can find the ‘glory hole’ where walleye (pickerel) or whitefish are having a family reunion. Secondly, it is often cold. So I give up fishing once the ice forms and wait patiently until the first day of the season in May when it may be warm enough to fish without a parka.

I confess to not paying much attention to the rules and regulations regarding slot size and the number of fish one can keep during the winter fishing season. But when my wife said she had told her friend at work that I would be happy to join her husband Freddie on one of his ice fishing expeditions, I had to do a Google of the Lake Nipissing walleye rules.

Freddie is one of those outdoorsmen who has everything. He owns a snow machine, an ATV, a very nice fishing boat and a Jeep. And all the equipment that goes with each of them – winches, CB radio, GSP, fish finders, more lures than WallyMart, at least a dozen really good rods, power auger - all the miscellaneous gadgets every serious woodsman needs. I was relieved though when he said we would be taking the Jeep, not the snowmobile, for our outing.

Freddie would pick me up at 9:00 a.m., which I thought was a very decent hour to go fishing in the winter. I don’t mind setting out to fish at 5:30 a.m. in the summer, but 9 o’clock gave me time for breakfast, coffee and three minutes to read the local paper. We would be set up in time for the 11:40 a.m. feeding frenzy and would leave shortly after the 2:25 p.m. afternoon feed, the times from his moon chart.

Freddie’s Jeep is an older model Cherokee that has seen some bush use, but wears its dents with some authority. The big lugged tires said we would have no problem getting out onto the lake. I did not notice any kind of a shelter but it was only -20 so I thought I could tend a line with a few breaks sitting in the warmth of the truck.

I asked Freddie what he thought about the slot size, not realizing that this was a sore point with him. He was of the opinion that we should be keeping the fish within the slot size and throwing back the little ones and the bigger ones. As a catch and release fisher, I don’t keep any fish to eat unless the fish has accidentally managed to get the hook in a gill or eye, a place where even barb-less hooks can do damage. I get my eating fish at the local fish counter.

Freddie went on to espouse on the number of fish that should be taken, holding that each fisher should be allowed to keep the first two fish caught through the ice, no matter what species. A good fisher would know where to go to catch walleye or whitefish. As for tourists from the south, he had little sympathy for them finding fish. If their resort host didn’t know where to place the huts, that was their problem.

I foolishly mentioned commercial netting and that lit a fuse that took 15 minutes to extinguish. Freddie says even Lake Nipissing is too small to support commercial fishing, whether by First Nations people or anyone else. I suppose the very need for a slot size says something about his argument. I did not buy his premise that the four-laning of the highway would bring more pressure on the fishery, thinking that Lake Simcoe still had some decent fishing even if it is only for the lowly perch.

As we drove out onto the ice, I was instructed activate the GPS that was on the dash. Freddie gave me the desired coordinates and we were soon at location X. It took some manoeuvring to get the Jeep over a precise spot, and although the lake was frozen and covered in snow, I thought I knew the place – there should be a shelf at about 15 feet where the bottom dropped to 25 feet. Satisfied that we were precisely over the underwater ledge, Freddie turned off the motor and began unloading equipment.

The first item to be set up was the fish finder, or more accurately the depth finder that beeped when a fish swam through the sonar cone. We cleared the snow down to solid ice where we placed the transponder. Freddie put the screen on the hood of the truck so we could see it from inside. He then augured two holes, one on each side of the truck, just two feet from the front wheels. When I asked where he kept the tip-ups, he said he didn’t use them.

Attaching a twelve pound test line to each windshield wiper, he ran the lines out over the bent coat hangers now lodged under the hood and down to the hole in the ice. He measured out exactly 18 feet of line and told me to select a jig. Freddie tied on a sliver spinner and small steel jig. I selected a spotted yellow Swedish pimple and hooked my minnow to it. We lowered the baits and got back into the truck. Freddie set the wipers to intermittent and we settled back to sip on some hot Tim’s coffee and nibble on a blueberry muffin while the wipers jigged. I was changing my mind about hard-water fishing.

The Jeep had a modern 5-disc CD in the dash and Freddie asked if I had any preference for music. He had Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart, Brahms and Wagner – an unusual selection for a fisher I thought, but who knew? Anything but the Wagner, he said. Wagner would be played only when we saw a fish swim into view on the fish finder.

Freddie’s watch beeped at 11:38 and he set the wipers onto a higher speed to increase the jigging action. At 11:39, a fish icon appeared on the screen. Freddie punched in disc 1, track 3 and Die Valkyrie boomed out of the speakers. Suddenly my wiper pulled away from the windshield and began making funny arcs through the air. I jumped out, grabbed the line and began hauling up a fish. Freddie too had a strike and was pulling up his line. Two jumbo perch, which we kept, based on Freddie’s recommendation for pan-fried perch. A few minutes later Freddie had small walleye which apparently was within the slot size.

We caught one more small pickerel (mine were pickerel) and we ate our lunch undisturbed by fish. The sun had come out and the temperature shot up to a pleasant -5. I could see why city folk might escape to such ideal environs. At 2:15 we cleaned the holes preparing for the next feeding. I changed from the yellow lure to a red and white one. Freddie frowned but said nothing. We had just settled back into the truck when the screen in front of us filled with fish icons. School of minnows, Freddie said, but increased the jigging tempo on the wipers. He had no sooner hit Wagner than all hell broke loose.

My wiper lifted off as before, but then seemed to be struggling with whatever was on the other end. The electric motor on the wipers made a funny noise and with a fuse-pop, quit. The wiper blade departed from the arm. I dove for it just as it went through the hole, missing it by inches.

I wondered about that red and white lure, Freddie said later as we packed up our two slot-size fish. We drove home with one wiper clearing the few snowflakes that were falling. Freddie agreed it had been a good day, saying that two fish each was enough for a taste treat. We agreed that if we needed more than that, we should go to the store. A person could guarantee the catch and it would be cheaper - especially if you factored in the cost of a wiper blade.

It turns out that there is no slot size on great northern pike.