The End of an Error

By Ron McFarland

Sometime in the 1980s, my fellow poet and friend Dennis Held, a Wisconsinite born to ice-fishing, introduced me to the frigid aspects of angling through the ice [see “Ice versus Fly,” IDAHO magazine, May 2015]. I remember thinking how one advantage of freezing your can off was that pests such as mosquitoes, yellowjackets, and deer flies would be no problem. Also, you wouldn’t have to worry about taking a header while wading the snot-slippery streambed of Lolo Creek.        

As I have aged, I have become more sedentary, a condition to which ice-angling is well adapted. At the same time, I’ve also experienced the inconvenience of attaching a microscopic #18 fly to my tippet. One needs one’s magnifying glass on such occasions, and one finds one has forgotten to bring that implement. One ties on a sensible #12, to no avail.

It follows that ice-fishing should be my angling method of choice, yet two years ago, I joined the Clearwater Fly Casters and quietly opted to resign from bobbing a salmon egg or corn kernel up and down through a hole bored by my aging ice augur.