How I Spent my Winter Vacation
Recently I found myself at the world’s largest ice-fishing tournament on Hole in the Day Bay of Gull Lake near Brainerd, Minnesota. There are probably two words I never wanted to use in the same sentence – ice and fishing – so it was with some reluctance that I found myself there in the first place. But being nothing if not a good sport, I packed all the cold weather clothing I could muster.
The sun rose on the day of the tournament to -19 degrees Fahrenheit with enough of a breeze to push the windchill down to -39. Lovely, I thought, as I put on every article of clothing I brought to balmy Brainerd. I’m no push-over when it comes to the cold. I live in the frosty part of Upstate New York and can shovel a mean sidewalk with the best of them, but there’s something about temperature readings that sound like they come from Antarctica that gives me pause.
The day before, a hundred volunteers stood in a line about ten feet apart, power augers in hand, and walked slowly across a large section of the bay stopping every twenty feet to put their augers to the foot-and-a-half-thick ice and drill a hole eight inches in diameter. These power augers stand about waist-high and look like huge corkscrews. It takes the strength of a construction worker and the stamina of a workhorse to use one of these babies and by the end of the day they had drilled an astounding 21,000 holes.
;)
The Brainerd Jaycees, the tournament sponsor, expected 7,000 ice fisherman and another 2,000 spectators. There were food tents, beer tents, and a warming tent that had about 20 heaters set up on tables in the middle. There was a tent where you could buy raffle tickets and a tent where you could buy the skin of any animal you could think of (a man wearing an entire fox skin – head and all – on his own head was happy to let you pet and fondle the skins for sale). You could buy hot sausage, hamburgers, and deep-fried chicken strips. Fried clams and fish chowder. It was a carnival with country music blaring from large speakers scattered about. And it was on the ice, which you were reminded of every time you tried to walk somewhere.
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