Northeast Outdoor Newsletter: February 2023

Everything I do outdoors has been self-taught. Some activities were learned earlier on like spin fishing. I can remember stuffing a K-Mart rod into a backpack and biking seven miles down to the Charlotte town beach when I was in seventh or eighth grade. We would turn over rocks looking for worms and fish under the covered bridge on Lake Road just south of the beach parking lot. A good day would be 5 or 6 yellow perch the size of a soda can pulled out of some of the nastiest, stagnant, green-brown water you can imagine. I loved every second of it.

When we were old enough to drive and had a means of transportation, we would leave American Legion Baseball practice in July at 6:30 and race down to the docks at Point Bay Marina, still in our practice gear. The trick was to get there just after 7pm, because that’s when the marina closed. I had been swiftly escorted off the property many times before for fishing in between the slips during the day, which is against marina rules. A good evening on the fuel docks would yield small bass, northern pike and a crappie or two in between the dozens of mosquito bites.

In college I taught myself how to ice fish. More specifically, in the winter of 2013-2014 with a few buddies that were willing to hop in the car and kill a few hours in the freezing cold. The first place I ever dropped a line was Colchester Pond. We showed up tremendously under-dressed and with very inadequate gear. We had found a few tip-ups in the basement of my buddy’s fraternity house and did our best to put them to good use. We didn’t even know where the bait shops were, we rigged up our traps with night-crawlers purchased from Murder Mart a few hours earlier (the UVM folk know what I’m talking about.) I had a Shakespeare “Dock Master” spinning combo from Dick’s Sporting Goods with god knows what line pre-spooled on it, and for a lure I had an Acme Kastmaster, which is not designed for ice fishing in the slightest.

I don’t remember the first trip under the bridge at Charlotte Beach, or that first evening after hours at Point Bay Marina, but that day in Colchester all those years ago has stuck with me ever since, and will for the rest of my life. In between breaking every leader and losing every hook on those rusty tip ups, I somehow managed to jig up two northern pike over 30 inches with a set-up that would be looked over in some third-world-countries. I hate that I’m going to say this, but from that point on, I was “hooked.”

I have been thinking of that day far more often this year than I have in years past, because this ice fishing season has forced me to return to that mindset of uncertainty, cluelessness and curiosity as I explore new water I have never considered fishing before. With the lack of fishable ice on Lake Champlain extending into February, I found myself exploring strange new worlds, as Captain Kirk would say, and fishing lakes that were brand new to me. Just to name a few, I have visited Great Averill Lake near the Canadian border, Indian Brook Reservoir in Essex, Chittenden Dam down near Rutland and Caspian Lake in the foothills of the NEK all for the first time. With the exception of Caspian, fish were caught and landed on every outing. There’s something that is so ego-boosting and confidence building about riding into a town you’ve never been to before and laying a couple of nice fish out on the ice.

These last few days are certainly going to change up the trajectory of the rest of the 2022-2023 ice fishing season, however. A blast of arctic air plunged temperatures south of -20 below zero, with an accompanied wind chill of nearly -50. Champlain will certainly be much more accessible in the next couple of days, and I’m certainly looking to capitalize. I find it hard to believe that it’s February 4th now and I still have yet to ice fish on Champlain. But that’s about to change.

As far as guidance, February really isn’t a whole lot different from January as far as a fishing approach goes. Pike, perch and pickerel are slowly showing up more often in the shallower and weedy bays of the Champlain Islands, and hopefully soon I’ll be able to drop a rattle trap on an offshore reef for some lake trout in the next couple of weeks. I’ve been lucky enough to put together SEVEN new videos for the YouTube channel since the end of 2022, don’t be shy and head on over to enjoy the action so far this year. It’s been pretty damn rewarding.