A Trip To The Adirondacks Scratches An Ice-fishing Itch.

By Aaron Swanson

There was a time when you could do it in Connecticut. In the 1970’s, the DEP (now DEEP) captured a 30-pound brown trout in their trap nets at Washining Lake, a large (for Connecticut) deep-water lake that produced the stuff of legends. When I was introduced to ice fishing, it was a place of numbers with enough mystique to make one believe the chance still existed. By the time I learned enough to begin catching holdover browns in the kind of numbers it takes to potentially connect with a giant, the herring population that sustained the fishery was crashing. After a couple years spent pounding our heads against the wall that the writing was on, we just stopped going.

This is not to say there aren’t other lakes in Connecticut where you can have a decent day jigging up trout. But “decent” has become relative to current conditions. Warm, dry summers, lake drawdowns meant to kill the weeds that choke the docks of lakefront homeowners, and a host of other factors have led to lowered expectations when targeting trout through the ice with a tiny rod. There are large fish to be had, sure, beautiful mutants grown and stocked by DEEP. And, there are lakes that still have holdover trout. And, there are all the other species Yankee ice fishermen can chase. Great. But, unless there’s a huge conspiracy to keep fantastic jigging action for trophy trout here in my home state hidden from me…well, as they say, the fishing isn’t what it used to be.

Enter: The Road Trip. As it turns out, a person, or a person and his fishing partners, can jump in a car, cross the state line and experience holdover trout fishing “like the old days,” with numbers and possibilities of unicorns—legit 20-pounders. They might not be brown trout, but they are trout nonetheless, just as beautiful and more ancient. Specially adapted to probe the depths in search of cold, oxygenated water and food. We can go jig for lakers!

Until a couple of years ago, the ingredients for this type of road trip hadn’t really started to mix and congeal in our minds. Like I said, we had numbers and possibility right here in the Nutmeg State. As our attention turned to targeting other species like northern pike and walleye, the thought of driving to find the kind of action we used to enjoy when staring at electronics and looking for marks on a screen started to sound much more appealing. I missed it. We missed it. Understand, pike and walleye fishing are great and hold incredible potential to see a fish that is a true monster for the region. The thing is, it’s mostly done by setting tip-ups and forgetting about them in between sips of brown liquor, waiting for short flurries of chaos and excitement. The urge to use the kind of continued focus it takes to drop a piece of metal tipped with some meat down 70 or 80 feet to waiting trout finally started to grow into a necessary reality.

Expectations are always high heading into a trip, no matter how long in duration or how far you go. A fishing trip that takes you away from home for a few nights does funny things to your brain. The possibilities are always endless and YouTube only serves to inflate your expectations. Watching unknown anglers haul up fish that would be records on the body of water you’re headed to tend to stretch those limits of possibility even further. Combine this anticipation with a fantastic inaugural trip the prior year that exceeded expectations and you’re flirting with THE. BEST. TRIP. EVER.

Luckily, a contact whom none of us had ever met in person, yet has continually bestowed us with up-to-the-minute information, tempered our zenith-set sights to a more realistic level. The bite was tough. Guys were landing about three for every five hooked. You had to work. Ok…who doesn’t love a good challenge, especially before you even show up and strap on your waterproof bibs? This was certainly a contrast to last year’s excursion to the same body, when 50-fish days weren’t out of the question, but how tough could it be? With the car packed the night before, tailgate sagging toward the ground, we got a couple of hours of shut-eye and were off to jig up some lakers, or at least go down trying.

We hit the bait shop by 7 a.m., right on schedule. We loaded up on small minnows to represent the smelts that make up one of the most prevalent bait sources our intended quarry relies on, as well as some larger baits, you know, for “the one,” or something like that. The procurement of a few jigs and other toys not sold closer to home saw us out the door and doing our best clown-car impression, unpacking a storage unit’s worth of gear out of my tailgate at the southernmost point of the 32-mile-long lake.

The mile-plus walk to the “numbers” we’d been given was exhilarating. Sweaty, but exhilarating. The funny thing about the “numbers” was that we essentially followed a footpath that turned out to be the tracks of our contact from the day before. Excitement and anticipation culminated with disappointing first drops. The screens were mostly blank, save for the lines representing our jigs bouncing up and down in 80 feet of water.

The reports were true.

Despite the best tricks our sleeves could muster up, by noon we had a whopping total of two fish on the ice and two missed hits. Thankfully, the guy in the group who was making his first trip of the season was the lucky lander of those two respectable fish. While everyone was there to catch trout, the big numbers seen during the previous year’s foray didn’t seem likely to materialize anytime soon—at least where we were.

The good news was that the sun was still shining and we had the better part of a half day ahead of us. Our attempt to pack “light” motivated us to take off on foot and start covering frozen water to look for fish that would be more willing to attack the white pieces of metal so highly regarded by the local lake trout whisperers.

Nothing, I mean, absolutely nothing. Having walked the better part of three-and-a-half miles without observing another interested mark, “Plan B” started looking better. Only problem was, the details of Plan B didn’t quite exist. Then, Lady Luck intervened and brought details of some potential next steps into sharp focus. Another angler within earshot seemed to be doing a little better than us, but not by much. As we continued to listen to him banter with buddies, he stopped short to take a phone call. The voice on the other end of the line, now on speaker phone, described a wholly different scene than the one we were part of. The spot, named in detail, had given up 20-plus fish measuring up to 26 inches to the lucky, unseen angler. We made sideways glances at each other, eyes widened as if trying to conceal our giddiness at this good fortune. At the call’s conclusion the recipient stood up and announced to his partners “Well, boys, change in plans.” Change in plans indeed!

Instantly renewed with confidence and energy, we made the long trek back to the car and re-arranged the copious amounts of gear that hadn’t caught us fish. We were off to the spot named without shame by our unknown benefactor. Our hopes were restored as we scouted potential access areas and found, oddly enough, anglers departing the ice who were willing to talk honestly about the day’s action. For three tight-lipped fish seekers and sometimes surfcasters from the Constitution State, this was not normal protocol. Back home, our smallish bodies of water and the smaller productive areas they hold are closely guarded and competed for in the freezing pre-dawn hours. Here, guys were telling us exactly where to walk to, how many fish they caught and what they were caught on. I suppose the mere size of a lake like George, with multiple access points to productive water, and, as far as I can tell, a bottom that is paved with fish, makes information flow a bit more easily in the Adirondacks.

JonA. That’s the only way I knew him, by his internet handle. This guy, for some reason, decided to open the door to the kind of fishing we were craving. Imagine that; someone I’d never even met or talked to on the phone invites the group he’d been corresponding with for years and gives us the keys to making the three-hour drive immediately worthwhile by severely shortening our learning curve. Thanks, man, credit where it’s due.

JonA became Jon the real person early the next morning in a pitch-black parking lot about a third of the way up the western shore of the lake. Our presence, combined with good reports, caused him to break his usual routine of avoiding weekends in favor of less-crowded weekdays. Our previous day’s speculation as to how to access the deep water out in front of some islands was for naught as he followed some of his regular contacts out to “the spot.” The cool part about this spot, and likely why anglers in the region are so forthcoming with news and information, is that there is plenty of room for all along the tightly grouped contour lines of the lake’s depths. We set up shop and got ready to scratch the old itch. And then we were on our way; between the four of us, we managed to put a quick pick of fish on the ice—none huge, but marks that would follow your jig off bottom and bend your rod during their ascent through the water column. There were smiles all around, a few high fives and maybe even a couple of pictures snapped. Then, the bite shut off.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. Between all of us, we threw the old kitchen sink at the fish we saw. But, most of the day went like this: a mark appears on my screen, moves toward my offering. I move it in anticipation…he’s following…yes! Keep coming! The mark stops, I drop down below it and raise it back up. The mark follows again, but only half as far, maybe five feet off bottom this time. I drop back down and try again. The mark disappears. Repeat.

At least those fish gave you hope. The ones that would appear a foot or two off bottom and never move, those are the one’s I’d like to yell at, if it were practical to stick my head through an eight-inch hole in the ice.

Of small consolation was that Jon’s repeated phone calls to other anglers, huddled in blue portable Clam ice shacks strewn across our field of view, weren’t doing a whole lot better. Even the best guys who fish multiple days a week struggled to put up double-digit numbers. As the sky started to glow pink through the clouds dropping snow on our stationary hut, the realization that reliving the “glory days” on this trip was sliding further out of reach. If we were to have any success, it would be during our abbreviated window the following morning.

Still, there were shots and beers to order at a local bar, laughs to have with new friends and pretty bartenders to sneakily stare at. Once that was accomplished, we could get back to the business of meeting Jon, again at an ungodly hour, in nearly the same parking spaces we had pulled into nearly 24 hours earlier.

A front was coming. The second of what would turn out to be three dreaded “polar vortexes” (should that be vortices?) was due to move into the region and we pontificated on the mile walk back out to the spot as to what that might mean for the fishing. For all our faults, it seems to me the one shining commonality among anglers is the ability to hope things will get better, to believe that “tomorrow is the day we’ll get ’em good!”

Well, that morning was the morning we “got ’em good.” The old days. Fish shooting up off bottom to grab your jig and struggle during their entire journey up 80 feet. One after another, hoots and hollers rang out from the randomly spaced group, barely a minute passing without a hook-up or the groan of a missed fish. There is something about having success on a rod barely three feet long, especially when your quarry all tape out in the range of two-thirds of its length. Were these fish huge by lake trout standards? Absolutely not. Was it a blast to hook up one after another and gather round the hole, taking pictures and shooting video to preserve the fun of the moment? You bet your Swedish Pimple it was. When the bite slowed a bit, we switched to jigheads adorned with stinky soft-plastic baits and used a different technique to continue to fool fish into eating our little puppets, danced specially for them 13 fathoms below our feet. Did I mention we caught all of our fish jigging?

The weather conditions that morning, while not particularly brutal, were enough cause to don most of the foul-weather gear we had brought. During one of the short spells I wasn’t working a fish, I looked up long enough to notice the wind had died and the sun was shining partially down through breaks in the seemingly ever-present flow of clouds we’d encountered for the last couple of days. Not a minute after I remarked (mistakenly, of course) at how pleasant our current conditions were, I looked northward to see walls of blown snow moving across the lake. The northwest wind slammed into us like a stampede and the vortex was upon us. Within 20 minutes, our screens were void of fish, our sleds covered in snow and, as a final sign from the universe that we’d had our shot, one guy’s electronics crapped out. It was time to go.

The ride home was one of satisfaction. We hadn’t killed it all three days or pulled up a giant, but the possibility was there, and we got ’em. I managed my largest laker to date, and we finally fished with our New York contact and learned a few new tricks for finicky trout. But, the simple pleasure of fulfilling a goal, one we don’t get a chance to attempt to achieve all that often anymore, was enough. We got ’em just jigging.