Through the ice

One afternoon we headed out to Jay's Sporting Goods in Gaylord.  Dave wanted to check out some of the new bows on the market.  For those of you who have never been in a sporting goods store with Dave, if you find yourself in that situation bring a book!

So here we are, waiting for Dave to shoot yet another bow.  We've looked at the pelts (she found one that was only 'playing dead' - an opossum), checked out all the fishing lures, laughed at the names of the hunting accessories and named all of the mounted animals and animal targets in the store.
 
After all those time consuming activities I thought we had run out of things to keep us occupied.  I was wrong.  Katie spied the last CLAM ice fishing shelter set up on display and promptly took a seat.  Upon sitting down she motioned for me to sit in the chair next to her and she handed me a 'fishing pole'.  Of course in those shelters the fishing poles have as much substance as the ice.

So here we are, ice fishing in the floor display shelter of Jay's Sporting Goods.  When I'd loose my bait Katie would reach into her bait bucket and hook a minnow.  I sat 'jigging' waiting for the big bite.  Well, I didn't get the first bite.

After a few minutes of sitting Katie feels the first big bite.  She pulls and reels in the fish.   She can just barely pull it through the hole in the ice but finally manages to land the biggest bass you have ever seen pulled through the ice.  A successful ice fishing trip if we finished there, but our adventure continued.

Katie 'unhooks' her big bass, tosses it onto the ice and then scopes out a new place to cast.  She gazes out the door of our shelter and spotted a fishing hole near the dog kennels that looks promising.  She winds up and casts her ice fishing line across the store and makes a perfect hit.  She hit the hole 20 feet away smack dab in the middle.  She is just that good.

After a few minutes of waiting she gets the big hit.  Wow, this is a whopper!  She fights the fish, reeling and pulling.  As hard as she is working the fish is fighting that much harder.  The fish is pulling so hard that the line is cutting a line through the ice.  All that back and forth between Katie and the fish has managed to saw a crack in the ice from that hole where Katie cast her line to the hole in the ice in front of her.  Amazing, truly amazing.

Once the fish gets centered in the hole she manages to wrangle the head to the hole.  She finally swings the fish around to get the head up through the ice and begins to pull the body out.  She pulls, and pulls and pulls.  What an amazing fish!  It takes her a full minute to get the entire body up out of the ice.  Once she lands her catch she examines this monster.  She has pulled a 6-foot-long northern pike through the concrete, um, I mean ice, at Jay!  Quite a little fisher person.

Finally, Katie makes her last cast.  This time she throws her bait into a hole over near the deer targets.  Within seconds she gets a bite, and it is the biggest one YET!  She struggles and fights this huge catch.  Every time she pulls, the beast on the other end of the line pulls just as hard.  Finally, after a long back and forth stand off Katie manages to tire out her catch and is able to reel it in.  She gets it up to the hole and finds the hole is too small!  She hands me a chain saw (how else would you cut a larger hole in the ice?) and asks me to cut the hole larger.

 Using the chainsaw I enlarge the hole and Katie manages to pull the head up through the ice.  She has pulled in a 12-point buck!  She gets the head up out of the ice and has to cut it off in order to get the rest of the body through the ice.  As she is deftly cutting the head she has me enlarge the hole yet again.  Because she is so efficient at severing the head of a deer pulled through the ice and I am so poorly suited to enlarging ice holes with a chainsaw Katie had enough time to mount the head of her deer while I chipped away at the ice.

Finally I was able to get the hole in the ice large enough to get the deer's body above water.  She lands that big ol' buck and cuts him up (She is just so darned quick with that knife of hers) into steaks, sausages and jerky.  Handing me all the packaged venison Katie packs up all of her ice fishing gear, picks up her head mount and we head back off the ice to find Dave.

We managed to find him back in the archery department just finishing up having shot the bows he had been looking at.  As we are walking out the store Katie tells him of all her adventures on the ice and shows Dave the trophy she has captured on her ice fishing adventure in the middle of Jay's Sporting Goods.  That trophy happens to be hanging on the wall in her bedroom, and although you can't see it she spends time every day cleaning his antlers.