When I first started ice fishing years ago my wife and our friends would go out and spend the whole day in one, maybe two areas. We'd bring tons of gear in our backpacks and on an old wooden sled. Then I picked up a JetSled which streamlined things quite a bit.
Over the past several years more people have moved away and others (myself included) have had kids and those long full days out on the ice with lots of folks are rarer than they used to be. My kids are still too young to enjoy being out on the ice, especially when the weather isn't perfect and so these days the majority of my trips are solo or with one other person. As a result, I move around A LOT. If I'm not marking fish within a few minutes I'm off to a new spot. My first few trips out this year felt really disorganized. I added a gas auger to the mix and things were always spilling out of or falling off my sled. So I decided to grab some scrap wood and do some modding.
Here are some pics from the first run of the new sled this morning (click for full size):
The orange bucket is for bait and the white bucket has been modified to hold my glacier bay tipups and the base mount for my buddy heater which is stored under the shelf. I picked up the stool, which has a pocket for things like snacks and drinks for $4 at walmart, which I thought was a steal!
I cut a shallow notch in the 2x4 that crosses the sled and lined it with a green scrubber so it would hold my auger in place and not spill fuel everywhere or crush my equipment. Under it I have a shallow plastic bin to hold propane canisters, premixed auger fuel, and some drinking water.
This setup makes it really easy to get to a spot, drill a hole, bring the sled over and start marking fish(hopefully) immediately and without needing to do a lot of fiddling around in my sled stowing and retrieving gear.
I knew I needed a shelf for my flasher instead of constantly picking it up and putting it down, and I wanted a place to get at my lures and leader material in a hurry for rigging up. I attached a waterproof tacklebox with heavy duty velcro and used some rubber grommets from a broken line holder box so I could run line from spools hanging on a dowel underneath the shelf. The line is kept under tension by a small bungee cord and a rubber band. I also attached a retractable line/braid cutter and drilled some holes to accommodate my 3 ice rods.
I set a few pieces of dowel into the shelf to make sure my flasher would stay put once it was bungeed down. For maximum utility and because I had one lying around a flag holder does double duty as an anchor point for the bungee and deadstick rod holder.
I had a rare earth magnet I got from an old hard drive that I stuck on the back of the sled to grab my skimmer tight and keep it from falling out of the sled while on the move.
Hidden on the other side of the shelf is some dacron which is handy for all kinds of things.
All in all I'm pretty excited, I only had an hour this morning and was able to spend MOST of it fishing, which is a far cry from how things were my first few trips out. My favorite thing about this build is that I had pretty much everything for it kicking around my scrap pile so I didn't have to break the bank and that it's minimally involved to take the wood rack on and off (4 screws) meaning in order to use the sled for hunting season I don't need to spend all day tearing it down come ice out.
