John Quelch, an ardent ice fisherman, invited me to join him on the pond last weekend after I called him to ask some questions about ice fishing. Expecting only to meet John for a conversation, I was excited to get the chance to join him out on the ice.
Before I met John in person, he made me promise not to print the name of his beloved fishing pond.
“Just to be clear up front,” he told me when I first spoke with him on the phone, “you can’t print the name of the pond.”
So, if you are reading this article in the hopes that you might pick up a few new ice-fishing hotspots, I will let you know up front that you are out of luck.
When I arrived at John’s pond, I parked the car and tromped out a hundred yards through thick snow to a bright green structure sitting like a jewel in the middle of the expanse of snow-covered ice.
While John has set up his holes within walking distance of the banks of his pond, many other ice fishermen choose to set up shop further afield — many use snowmobiles, ATVs or even trucks to haul all of their gear out on to the lake.
With difficulty, I followed the sled tracks to the middle of the lake and greeted the camouflage-covered man sitting resolutely in the folding chair outside of the wooden structure and sipping a Bud Light.
“Is John Quelch around?” I asked the man.
“Sure is,” the man replied. “This is his, after all,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the wooden structure and all of the equipment behind his chair. I had no idea what, exactly, was John’s, but it seemed to me that it was something significant.
John, who stood in the middle of the lake holding a green contraption attached to a fishing reel, waved me over to him from a distance. Dressed for the weather in a sturdy, hooded canvas jacket and a pair of sunglasses to offset the blinding white sunlight, John took me through the step-by-step process of ice fishing.
John began the tour with the green structure in the middle of the lake that served as his de facto headquarters.
“So do most ice fisherman use warming huts like this one?” I asked him.
“I guess you can call it whatever you want,” John told me affably, “but it’s called a shanty. Not everyone uses a shanty, but most guys do.”
The shanty itself consisted of four plywood walls and a tin roof built on top of a pair of skis. The interior boasted two small benches that could accommodate four non-claustrophobic individuals, a few small shelves, a central table and small plexiglass windows that enable John to keep an eye on his rigs even when he is warming up in the shanty.
Armed with a plastic fork, I speared a chunk of sizzling venison from the tiny stove that sat atop the lone table in the little wooden structure at John’s insistence.
He built this particular shanty with his father years ago, and he drags it out every year alongside a sled full of his gear as soon as the ice becomes solid enough to support the weight. The shanty is the ember of warmth that maintains John’s body heat through the frigid Vermont winter mornings.
The outside of the shanty was painted in a rich emerald green. Beside the door is a placard that provided John’s name and hometown.
John’s shanty is the only one on his pond, and thanks to a tight-lipped group of friends, his exclusive access to the waters underneath the ice is not often challenged. On the day that I went out to visit John, however, there was another group of two people on the northeast corner of the pond, a mere 30 feet from the outer perimeter of John’s equipment.
“I know I got a bit too close to them,” John told me, arching his head in the direction of the other anglers, “but I always fish here.”
John explained to me that proper ice-fishing etiquette typically requires that all parties on a particular lake maintain a respectful distance from one another. This serves the dual purpose of maintaining the psychically important territory and preventing obnoxious fishing line entanglements that sometimes occur when fish yank a length of line through a neighbor’s gear.
More often than not, John is alone on his lake for the entire day. He prefers his smaller, quieter lake to some of the larger, more heavily fished lakes. Despite his preference for fishing alone or with a small group of friends, however, John is still an active participant in state derbies, which are fishing contests that are often sponsored across the state of Vermont. In the past, John has won the bronze and silver awards, but he has yet to capture the largest fish in the competition and claim the gold.
On the same morning that I fished with John, more than 380 people were out on Lake Bomoseen, which hosted a derby over the course of the weekend. These hundreds of participants set up shanties all across the lake in the hopes that they would win a portion of the cash prize awarded for capturing the largest fish.
John was out on the lake with a bunch of his friends on this particular morning because the weather was so friendly. On many mornings, it is dangerous to stand outside on the lake for more than a few minutes, John explained to me, so shanties are important for serious fishermen. John, who did not strike me as much of a complainer, left what exactly he meant by dangerous to the imagination.
On this particular morning, however, I got lucky. The sky was ablaze with sunshine, and the biting cold had receded to afford us a balmy morning in the mid 30’s.
John had arrived at his pond at around six in the morning to begin drilling his holes for the day. Eager to make the most of his outings — this was the eighth of his winter season this year — John is diligent about arriving early to make the most of his time on the water. In John’s book, a successful day of fishing goes “from dark til dark.”
John bores into the ice with a gasoline-powered auger, a massive handheld corkscrew that drills holes with an eight-inch diameter down through the ice. When he arrives in the morning, John drills eight holes into the ice, clearing the area around the holes of snow so as to allow unrestricted access to the depths below later on in the day. Vermont law allows each fisherman to operate eight holes at a time. The only exception to the eight-hole cap is Lake Champlain, Vermont’s largest body of water, which allows each fisherman to oversee 15 holes.
John arranges the holes in a circle beginning and ending with his shanty. From a bird’s eye of view, the configuration resembles an oval-shaped necklace with a giant emerald at the end. Into each hole, John places a fishing rig.
The rigs are wooden cross-posts that sit in the holes. The undersides of the crosses contain reels of 150-foot long, reinforced double-woven green filament. John first measures the depth of the bottom of the pond at each site and then affixes a small leader to each line to ensure that the bait — a bunch of shiners flitting around in a plexiglass bucket — its roughly one foot on top of the pond’s floor, where most of the fish are thought to live.
John’s apparatus features an underwater jock, which would remain functional and continue to let out line even if the top of the hole were to freeze.
On the top of the rig mechanism sits a small orange flag that flips up into the sky to indicate that a fish has taken the bait. Once the rigs have all been set up, John and any of his friends can simply sit in the chairs by the shelter and relax.
Although John must periodically walk around the perimeter of his rigs and poke the tops of the holes with an ice skimmer to keep them from freezing, much of the day is spent relaxing on the lake.
In addition to the venison that John had cooked on the stovetop in the shanty, John and his friends were well stocked with bratwursts and beer to keep them going through the long day of fishing.
While I only arrived at the pond at nine, John and his friends had been on the pond since the early morning, and they had already caught a few small perch. After all of the venison disappeared, one of John’s friends grabbed a filleting knife and began dismembering the squirming fish with a few deft strokes of the knife. Having quickly separated the fish into piles of scales, bones and meat lying on the snow, he took the fish fillets and put them on the skillet in the shanty.
As I stared into John’s bucket of shiners and listened to the perch begin to sizzle and pop as it cooked on the tiny gas stove, John snapped me out of my distraction by yelling “Tips up!” in chorus with all of his buddies.
An expression describing the movement of the small orange flags mounted atop the rigs, the rallying cry “tips up” is the expression on the tip of every expectant fisherman’s tongue. At long last, John’s diligence was validated.
I walked quickly through the snow to watch John haul up a pike from the thin hole. The pike was beautifully striped, with gorgeous scarlet markings. Pike, which aren’t eating fish, are some of the most common hauls in ice fishing.
John laid the fish on the ground outside of the hole and expertly removed the hook from its mouth with an implement that resembled a pair of pliers.
The pike more than made up for its lack of appeal to the stomach with a brilliant appeal to the eyes. Swathes of red, blue and yellow swirled into one another along the fish’s tail, and the pike’s powerful lower jawbone jutted out aristocratically.
“That’s a beautiful fish,” I told him.
He smiled, and the creases around his eyes expanded behind his sunglasses.
“It sure is,” he said. Without another word, he tossed the pike through the small hole and back down into the cold water below. Afterwards, he walked back to his shanty with a grin hewn into his coarse beard, already looking forward to the next tip up.
Braving the Cold for the Big Catch
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