Jen's column / Fishing

Here's this week's column on Jay's annual ice-fishing trip. There's so much more to the story than what my paltry P-B word count allows. For starters, I didn't have enough room to mention that Dave and Jay buried Dave's truck in the snow during their first trip out to the lake. Instead of digging it out, they unloaded Dave's three-wheeler (yes, THREE-wheeler) and hit the icehouse -- leaving the truck behind in the snow until they were done fishing. Can you just see them? "Ah, it'll be alright here. Let's unload the wheeler and go fishing!"

Here's the rest of the story...

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It's ice fishing season again. My husband is on his annual trek to Bemidji to "chase some eyes" with his buddy Dave. That's code for "catch some walleye," by the way. I don't expect you to be up on the lingo.

True to history, Jay started piling his fishing equipment on the art room table a good week before he left. (Which is fine with me, because we haven't actually used the art room table in months. No matter how many little baskets of felt and glitter I stock in that space, craft projects always end up on — and often glued to — our kitchen table.)

So there it all was, piled high in the art room: The rods, and reels, the tackle. The subzero socks, the long underwear, the Carhartts. The cameras, the fish finders, the GPS. The package of 50 freezer bags — and the giant cooler they'd be returning home in, full of filets, when the trip was done.

On the top of the stack was the big white binder that proves, truly, how crazed my husband has become. Wrapped in its protective sleeves are topographic maps of "lakes of interest." The form he'll need when it's time to register his record-sized fish. Step-by-step instructions for pickling northerns.

It's safe to say the fishing bug has hit hard. If I needed further proof, I'd just look next to my bed, which is where Jay's new trolling motor (a 36/36, I'm told) is being stored. He doesn't want to leave it outside, lest it get cold.

I've gotten a few phone calls from the icehouse this week.

"I got the first walleye!" was the first message, left just hours after his Bemidji arrival.

The next day's message was a little less enthusiastic. "I got the smallest walleye of my life," he reported. "It's the size of my thumb."

Things went downhill from there. "Lake Bemidji was a dead sea today," he told me the next day. "We only brought back one perch. But we're not giving up. Tomorrow we're going mobile. We're going to hike to a prime lake. Guaranteed fish. Crappies the size of hubcaps."

I called him on the ice the next afternoon. "Any giant crappies jumping through the hole at you?" I asked.

"This is the worst fishing trip of my life," Jay answered, clearly defeated. He told me how he and Dave dragged their gear through more than a mile of thick, trail-less woods — and how their sleds tipped every 12 yards, repeatedly dumping rods and tackle and buckets of gear. How it was pitch black when they started out — and how the only lantern they had fell and broke. How the forest was littered with wolf tracks as big as grapefruits and how they kept stepping in fresh streaks of wolf urine. How they'd been on the lake for seven hours… and had only 6 northerns to show for it.

"I've never worked so hard for fish in my whole life," Jay said at the end of his tale.

There was a slight pause, when I was expected to say something encouraging and bright. Instead, I said, "You realize I'm going to write about this, don't you?"

He paused just long enough so that I thought he was going to veto the idea.

But then he said, "I can give you incredibly detailed details if you want. In fact, the last time you wrote about my Vexilar, I was a little hurt that you didn't mention the model number. You want to know what it is? FL-8SE."

Thanks, honey. This time I got it.