Paul's Hunting Blog: Ice Fishing Mousam Lake

First things first; my wife and I are expecting our first child in August! We took a 20 hour drive out to Michigan to tell our families last week. We stayed for about 12 hours and drove 18 hours back to Maine. It was exhausting but everyone is excited for the best outdoors baby that ever walked the earth to arrive.

Anyway, I am sure everyone has heard "A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work." The person who came up with that saying has never fished with me. I have had some BAD days on the water and I love my job. This past trip is no different than some other fiascoes I have had. I got permission from a guy at work to park at his camp on Mousam Lake in Maine where he has lake access. I borrowed a Jiffy 10" propane auger from another guy at work and got to the lake just fine. The lake is only a 2 line lake since it has landlocked salmon in it but it also contains perch, bass, pickerel and brown trout. I drilled a couple of holes off of a point and found a good weedbed at the bottom. I set up one of the Little Man tip ups I recently got with a medium-sized shiner about 6 inches over the weeds. I then jigged in another hole for a while with a size 3 swedish pimple. I was in about 8-10 feet of water. Nobody else was out on the lake. I was the only one on the lake that I saw even though the temperature was in the 20's and not too windy. There was between 20-30" of ice on the lake which took the auger right down to my boots to punch through on some holes. I didn't catch a thing. I was there for about 4 or 5 hours until dark. It snowed for about 2 hours in the middle of my time there. I tried everything I could think of to at least get a bite from any fish. I drilled about 5-7 holes while I was there to try different depths. The auger ran great! It took no more than 2 pulls to start every time. I tried adjusting my live bait depths and jigged with every lure I brought but had no luck. I recently picked up a Big Eye heavy jigging rod that I through a Shimano Sedona 750 on and it is an awesome big game ice fish set up. I had some smaller pan fish jigging rods with me as well but no bites. I ended up getting stuck trying to leave later. The driveway I parked in had about 4 inches of the smoother ice than a zamboni could make on it and about a half and inch of powder from the days snow on top. I stripped a dead tree of all its bark, used a blanket from my car and pounded out 30 feet of ice in order to get my car out of the driveway I was in. It took about 3 hours to go 30 feet. At times I had my vehicle in park and was able to slide it around on the ice pushing it with one hand. It was the worst ice I have ever seen. When I finally got to the one lane road I drove in on I had a long hill to climb and I was never able to make it. After several frantic calls to many very helpful friends and 8 not-so-helpful towing companies; I had my amazing wife drive out to pick me up and leave the damn car overnight until I could figure out how to get it out of the middle of nowhere. I walked about 1/4 a mile through the woods in the dark and met my wife on the main road. The next day she drove me back out there and we walked back to my car. On a last ditch try before I called roadside assistance I tried the hill one last time. This time I had a pregnant woman and a dog in the car and apparently that made all the difference in the world as I was somehow able to gun it out of there.

This Saturday I will be helping out at the Kids Ice Fishing Derby in Poland Maine. It should be a blast and hopefully I can get some good pictures of some actual fish.