Some fishing and hunting outings end with full game bags or fish stringers, and others end up with nothing but the receipts of the money you spent. Empty fish stringers don’t always mean that the trip was not a fun or successful one, though. It depends on what criteria you use to define success.
I recently traveled to St. Cloud to attend the Minnesota Pheasants Forever state meeting. This event has been canceled the last few years, and attendance was a little lower than normal due to the recent surge in COVID-19.
I called a friend who I knew was also attending and asked him if he was interested in going up a day or two early to try our luck spearfishing on a lake that neither one of us had ever been on – or for that matter ever even heard of.
Being the adventurous sort, he agreed to give it a try. The name of the pond we tried was a 65-acre lake called School Section Lake in Stearns County. Everyone was driving their trucks on this lake, but I can’t seem to bring myself to drive my dog truck on ice. I towed my ice rig Polaris Ranger with tracks on it, and we off-loaded that and went exploring with a rig that weighs 1,000 pounds instead of a truck that tips the scales at about 5,000 pounds including everything I carry.
When you cut a spear hole and then leave that spot, you try to mark it with a stick from the shore. This makes others on the lake know that there is a spot where the ice will be thinner than the overall lake. We saw several sticks protruding from the snow and decided if that spot was good enough for them, it would be good enough for someone who had never been on the lake before.
I had recently purchased a new battery-operated ice drill and was pretty excited to try it out. I attached the battery, and when I pulled the trigger it turned about two times and died. I tried again and got the same results. I knew that when the batteries were cold, they would not operate at full capacity, but I thought they would at least work a little. I was wrong. I tried an additional new battery I bought with the unit, and it also did nothing.
Back to the truck we went, and after 30 minutes on the truck’s defroster, they worked like a charm. I wonder if this only happens to me or if other battery-operated ice drills do the same thing. We got the hole cut, set up the portable, and we were off to the spearfishing races.
In spearing you sit still and hope the fish come to you. Most often you will use either a large sucker chub on a safety pin or other fake decoy to attract the pike to you. Some use spoons or painted golf balls to attract the fish. I had purchased four large suckers about 10 inches long from the local bait shop. When you are trying to decoy a pike, the goal is to have that pike come in nice and slow to check out if they want to eat your offering. If you use a smaller bait, they will often blast in and gobble up the decoy and flash out of sight in about a half a second. This slash and grab offers no opportunity to throw a spear. Bigger bait often slows down the approach.
I have had fish that have come into the hole and stayed for five minutes. Others will cruise on through without even stopping to sniff the potential meal.
My trip to St. Cloud was a smash and grab experience. I started with four large baits, and in about two hours I had no bait left at all. The fish wanted nothing to do with my other decoys. It did not matter if that was a spinning spoon, a painted golf ball or one of about 15 different-colored and -sized hand-carved decoys I tried.
The fish we saw were all large fish. They engulfed a 10-sucker chub like I enjoy a single Lay’s potato chip. It is very exciting to see big fish, even if they don’t give you a shot to take them home in your truck. The other side benefits of spearing are you get to see all of the other fish in the lake. We saw multiple large-mouth bass that I estimated to weigh five pounds. We saw a few hundred pan fish, but they never looked like eater size. Turtles, frogs, crawfish and other lake inhabitants all come by to visit.
Southwestern Minnesota where I live has very few lakes with water clear enough to spear in. Not all that far north of me there are hundreds of lakes that qualify as crystal-clear lakes. After I got home, I was able to visit with a local that spears on the lake I tried. He explained that that lake has lots of spearing pressure and that the pike are now smart enough not to loiter in the kill zone. They flash in and flash out and in many cases get a free meal in the process.
I didn’t think a pike could get that smart, but after two days I was proven wrong. We saw, if even for an instant, over 25 fish in two days and I did not manage to put a spear in a single one. It was still a great outing, and my lack of success has not dampened my desire to try again.
Spearing has experienced a resurgence over the past five years or so. More folks enjoying natural resources and buying licenses means more revenue to manage those resources.
There are a lot of lakes in Minnesota. Find an avenue to give this sport a try. You’ll get hooked just like I did. I equate it to bow hunting for deer. You sit still for long periods but when the big one shows up, you forget it was 100 hours since you saw the last one.
Scott Rall, Worthington, is a habitat conservationist, avid hunting and fishing enthusiast and is president of Nobles County Pheasants Forever. He can be reached at scottarall@gmail.com. or on Twitter @habitat champion.