Naturally Oliver and I hit the ice confidently after last week. Nothing was happening after an hour or two, but I still felt confident. Despite my persistent feeling for the back of the lake, where there's not such pressure on the fish. We took position where we saw salmon caught last time, and also set a few devices where we caught the bass and lost the pickerel.
Someone who Oliver and I had seen in the distance down lake came in. As he was about to pass by, I asked how he did.
"I set up over the deep water and got no hits from salmon or trout after four hours. So I moved into the weeds and caught a bunch of pickerel. None of them were good-sized, though."
Soon a father and son arrived. They proved to be some of the most knowledgeable ice fishermen I've spoken to. Oliver spoke to them independently of me, and he nailed it when he told me, "Goes to show what ice fishing a lake repeatedly, results in."
True. But Oliver didn't mean that in any derogatory sense, and even if they only fish here, they're good. When they set three Jaw Jackers in shallow water right near the bank of three or four feet, possibly a little deeper if three or four feet is just the top of the weeds, I thought they didn't know what they were doing. I had set tip-ups near the bank but not that near--in eight and five feet of water closer to the steep drop-off than the bank. Within 15 minutes, they had a fish I thought at first was a pickerel, then bass...but I swore the fish looked like a trout. When the second fish got caught from the same hole, Oliver swore it was a trout. Soon we talked to them, and, yes, the fish were trout. They had set six other devices, pretty much all in very shallow weeds, and the son jigged.
In the middle of all this, Oliver and I still waiting on our fatheads and shiners, a bald eagle showed up. It took position in a tree. I approached with my 70-200mm zoom on my Niko D850, and before I could get a shot to crop, it flew off. The father told me, "It wants the trout. It'll be back."
A few other ice fishermen left the lake, all of them apparently skunked. I assume so because we watched whenever one of them tended his tip-ups. No fish. And I later learned the father and son had given another the two trout. And we never saw him catch any.
Oliver had to leave at 5:00 and he left fishless. I stayed on into dusk, leaving the lot perhaps a little after 6:00. In the meantime, the eagle returned twice, and the second time, the son had caught another trout--they had three in total, lost some hits, and lost something big that "might have been a pickerel," according to the father.
The son tossed the trout away from him onto the ice. The eagle swooped low, extended talons forward, and took the gift.
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