Our Outdoors: It’s Electric
By Nick Simonson

I recognize a strange duality in the way I approach the outdoors with technology – going low teach or high tech – and the options I’m provided for any given trip on the water allow me to indulge either side of that coin.  On the ice, I was an early adopter of sonar, begging and pleading for a Vexilar FL-8 for Christmas one year and not fishing the first week of holiday break until I’d received it in my stocking, deeming the inability to see what was below to be such a handicap to a successful outing.  Other times, I shun sonar all together, leaving even an old portable model at home to chase trout on the fly from the front of my beat-up 16-foot off-brand aluminum puddle jumper without the beep and scroll of the small screen.  With fishing, it depends on the situation, I guess.
Then there are also times where I’ll stare down a display at the sporting goods store or look over the half-page printouts of new boat sonars with screens as big as the television I had growing up (and far slimmer), capable of seeing what lies out in 100 feet both directions from the boat.  With a tap of the finger on the silhouette of a marked fish, one can simply make a hard right and be over the top of it. While that almost seems like cheating, newer models offer live displays showing actual fish swimming around the transducer.  I’d likely never make that jump, unless I was forced to, and that is exactly what has happened this winter.
I’ve always been a gas auger guy.  Mixing fuel with a few drops of two-cycle engine oil on a Jiffy Model 30 and burning through 150 holes with the small tank of gas to find roving schools of crappies or that old sunken rockpile on the otherwise mud-bottomed flat for walleyes has been standard operating procedure in my ice angling adventures.  Even if I didn’t catch many fish, I always felt like I got a great back-and-shoulders workout in the process.  While that Model 30 was a workhorse, I traded the heavy yellow-headed auger in for a lighter Strikemaster which promised a leaner unit with the same amount of hole-drilling capacity, and it delivered. Over the past couple of seasons, with warmer winters, busier schedules, and an always-open powerplant lake nearby, my limited hardwater time made the constantly disconnecting fuel line and slight wobble in the shaft of the aging model somewhat tolerable, but I knew time was running out on the nearly 10-year old auger.
I had been reluctant to join the recent electric revolution when it came to augers.  Coming up on the roar and exhaust of gas models, there was something cathartic in firing one up and chewing through three feet of ice, watching the cone of shards and slush build at my feet.  The scent of the fumes mainlined into my lungs from the engine became as evocative of successful times on the ice as the actual scent of fish on my winter gloves.  But, like the spot that no longer yields fish after a few successful seasons, there’s a time we all stop fishing our memories.  So, I took the plunge and purchased a 40-volt electric ice auger this season, an increase in technology based somewhat on necessity.
With a click of the battery and the beep of the powerhead, I was off, surprised by the relative silence and notable power of the whirring blades below.  I punched a dozen holes, and while I was certain that was sufficient for my start on the small panfish lake, I ripped through a dozen more and another dozen effortlessly after that.  Each icy cone that built up in my grid confirmed my purchase as the unit brushed away buyer’s remorse as easily as my shovel scraped and tossed the slush from the lake’s surface.  There was no deafening roar and no combustion fumes but more than enough power to start my afternoon of fishing for the bluegills and crappies below. 
Finding a school, I chased them around the grid, picking a couple nice fish out of the group of mostly smaller panfish on the near-metro water.  When they reached the edge of my area I expanded the search, ripping out further into the depths with the electric auger until I relocated them time and again.  The battery light barely flickered as I approached sixty holes, and I began to think it would take a day full of drilling to run it dead as the model continued to do most of the work; the blades pulling me down, instead of getting my second workout of the day by having to force it into the ice.  I cursed my reluctance not to invest in an electric auger sooner, but also figured it timed out well with the recent release of the updated powerhead in my hands likely working the bugs out of its predecessors and shaving more than three pounds off their weight. As I watched for the subtle bump on the neon tip of my ice rod signaling a panfish take below against the white cone around the hole, I began to yearn for a longer winter.
It’s funny how technology can have that effect, changing the trajectory of how we fish and how we perceive any form of angling and how it should be, whether it’s in terms of comfort that keeps us going, abilities that allow us to see below the water or ultimate success when those two items and a school of willing fish come together. While I still remain stubborn on certain upgrades and know that I can abandon them as the situation calls for it, it’s likely that the roar and exhaust I’ve equated with all past ice seasons is now just a memory…in our outdoors.

Our Outdoors: Help From My Friends
By Nick Simonson

A heightened wind gust flapped at the canvas of my flipover shack as my youngest son, Jackson, sat next to me sounding out the longer words in his brother’s book which I had tucked into the pocket of my ice fishing jacket and provided to him after our run of fishing had quieted down some and the in between doldrums settled in.  My older son, AJ, had found a spot between my brother and my buddy helping to reel in the last flurry of perch that had rolled through as the northwest wind peaked in the middle of the final Saturday of January.  Waiting on one more school to move in, I nervously watched the screen of my sonar hoping that our shortening window of time would provide one more blast of action.
Helping Jackson through longer words like “noticed” and “promised” on the brightly colored pages of the hardcover comic book about a policeman dog and an artist cat and dozens of other animal characters, I listened as he handled most of the other words with relative ease, sounding them out when needed.  Meanwhile, my older boy requested a playlist from his uncle, and soon the biggest pop hits of the 2010s were playing in the adjacent canvas flipover, just audible over the rushing wind and the whipping fabric.  He had found his spot in the neighboring shack, thanks to a solid run of black-striped fish and the urgent call for his help stemming from the suggested inability of the two well-seasoned adult anglers to manage all of the incredible action going on in the house, with bobbers popping and their jigging rods already doubled over.  The sense of his importance in the moment was not lost on him as he shouted his tally and its upward trend as a few singleton perch roamed through the area and he continued to uphold his reeling duties on the bobber rods.
The ages of eight and five certainly help build sibling rivalry, and suddenly – in addition to height, speed, distance jumped and how high one can count – the number of fish in a bucket became a brotherly measuring stick.  Traded elbows, near contact (but not actual contact) with index fingers and ratcheted-up namecalling led to competition in the blowing snow outside the shack to see who could move more slush with an ice scoop. All those however changed with an invite of one kid into one shack, and the other joining my team as we hunkered over our holes and set our hooks.  That help from my two most regular fishing buddies would have made the day a success in itself, but the fun continued as the zoomed-in side of my Vexilar screen turned red and pink when a new cloud of fish moved in.
“The wall is back,” I shouted as our bobbers disappeared and my jigging rod bent with a none-too-subtle strike. 
Jackson was bringing up his biggest fish of the day as my float went below the bottom of the ice.  I grabbed it and handed it to him as soon as he was done with the first one and he reeled in a matching fish as I landed a slightly smaller one.  AJ’s shouts of excitement could be heard as well through the wind tunnel between our shacks as a sizeable group of fish settled in.  By the end of it, six jumbos were stacked to my right on the inside of the sled, and we had released at least that many more in the blur of bobbers, rebaiting and shouts of growing totals that rivaled Gimli and Legolas at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. After the final round of excitement, I managed one more fish and as AJ came over to confirm his brother’s count was accurate, I handed him the perch, requesting that he add it to the bucket.
“Okay, but this counts as another one for me,” he bargained, explaining that technically he was the one who was putting it in the pail.  
With a laugh, we began to wrap up our day on the ice, many hands making for lighter work as we packed up and daisy-chained our sled houses and my brother towed us back on his snowmobile to the access point on the prairie lake. It was a team effort filled with fun fishing, memories made, and ongoing contests that will continue into the future, made possible through the helping hands of good friends …in our outdoors.

Our Outdoors: All Smiles
By Nick Simonson

I’m a Christmas carol guy through and through, which generally makes coming out of the holidays a little hard on my psyche. The satellite radio stations that I’ve been listening to since the day after Halloween are all returning to their regularly scheduled programming for the next ten months, and the last scraps of wrapping paper I picked up from where the cat had them stashed in her corner of the living room from Christmas Eve are signs the season of joy is quickly coming to an end. All we’re left with are the memories, and apparently the request from Michael Bublé that Mother Nature let it snow, with the first stretch of sub-zero temperatures coming with it for good measure, as the drifts outside my office window mount and my snowblower gets its first true test in a few years.
The thought of a long winter, and one with conditions that may even limit hospitable days for ice fishing, doesn’t seem to bother me this year, however, as I’ve set up my plans for time at the lure making desk and found more than the traditional Colorado blades to craft into my favorite two-hook walleye harnesses.  In addition to those staples, throughout the previous fishing season I’ve experimented with a selection of new blades and spinner formats and found some great ones that not only caught fish on a patterns I will fine tune, but they also opened me up to some new styles of angling as well.
Among them are smile blades of various sizes and colors that when strung ahead of a standard harness change up the vibration and attraction of my go-to two-hook rig. Where they really shine (besides in the super-clear water) is at the lead of a slow-death rig.  When trolling over rocky outcroppings and gravel bars on a few trips this summer, dropping the speed and lowering these slightly flashier offerings helped connect with walleyes when fishing some favorite lakes.  The blades turn easily at the slow speeds which the bent-hook rigs require for the hypnotic natural worm action and can be pinched and adjusted to have a more subtle flash or a stronger whir when moved through the water.  With just a trio of beads in between the blade and the hook, they’re quick to put together and make a nice offering in the middle of the more subtle standard slow death rig with its spinning, threaded crawler and the standard bottom bouncer spinners with heavier metal blades that require a faster troll.
Additionally, I’ve found a great in-line offering for walleyes that worked well in mid-summer, via the substitution of a butterfly blade in place of the usual clevis-connected Colorado.  With two blades set opposite of one another, the butterfly rig spins and whirls along the line, creating a different vibration and a unique look leading up to a single hook or a harness.  They’ve been part of my outgoing spinner rig packages to friends and family throughout the past month and will make up a roll of their own heading out of winter, simply due to the success they brought last summer. 
With these additions, I have begun to wonder what’s next for my walleye rig tying: chopper blades, similar offset spinner leads, or maybe something different?  From the way the snow is mounting outside at this early stage of winter, it’s likely I’ll have a good amount of time to tie them all up before I get the chance to try them out when the landscape is less white and the water is a little more liquid.  Until then, I’ll agree with the fading Christmas carols – let it snow!  Because in this time, I’ll experiment some more, making rigs to be tried out next spring, and restock my stash with those new ones I found success with in the previous year, be they a modification of old favorites, the flickering of a brand new butterfly rig, or perhaps just a roll of all smile blades, bringing continued joy to my evenings long after the holidays until they are ready to hit the water…in our outdoors.