Montana > Ice Fishing Montana

Drill in your ice anchors

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pmmpete:
It can be quite entertaining to watch ice anglers chasing their ice shelter across a lake.  To avoid offering this kind of entertainment to others, I'm religious about anchoring down my ice shelter as soon as I set it up, even when the wind is calm in the morning.  But it can be a hassle to put in ice anchors.  I used to have to bang repeatedly on the top of my anchors to get them to start screwing into the ice.  And then you have to twist and twist and twist to sink them.

You can sink your ice anchors quickly and easily by using a drill and an ice anchor installation tool such as those made by Clam, https://shop.clamoutdoors.com/extreme-ice-anchor-installation-tool-attachment.html, Eskimo, https://geteskimo.com/products/ice-anchor-drill-adapter, and HT Enterprises, https://www.tacklehaven.com/ht-enterprises-ice-anchor-drill-tool-adapter-ait-1/.  A cordless electric drill will get the job done, but so I don't need to remember to keep an electric drill recharged, and so I don't need to worry about the battery crapping out due to cold weather, I prefer to use a brace to install my ice anchors manually.  For those of you who are below retirement age, a brace is a kind of manual drill used to drive auger bits into wood.  A picture of my brace in action is shown below.  I set the tip of my anchor on the ice and start cranking. The anchor starts sinking immediately, and is quickly driven up to its head.  To remove the anchor, I reverse the process.

If you go to the tool department of Home Depot or your local hardware store and ask for a brace, you'll probably get just a confused look, but braces can be found on the internet at reasonable prices, and you can find them at pawnshops and junk stores.  If you look for a used brace, look carefully at the chuck, as that is the part of a brace which is most likely to be defective. But the cheapest way to acquire a brace is to borrow one from your Granddad, who probably has one hanging in his workshop.

My Eskimo ice anchors fit into my Clam drill adapter.  But I have a friend whose Eskimo ice anchors don't fit into a Clam adapter.  So when buying an adapter, it's worth bringing one of your ice anchors with you to the store to be sure it fits into the adapter.

meandcuznalfy:
Nice, I never thought about one of those, see plenty of them in the second hand store here for cheap.

DR.SPECKLER:
I put a anchor in a corner before i set my hub up.

krispcritter:
Thats what I did. $2 brace at a yard sale and quick to put in or take out.

oldschoolben:
Lmao  I was one of those guys chasing my pop up  ,it was a calm day not even a breeze until on gust that lasted maybe a minute but took it out a long ways lol, good thing there was as only a few guys on the ice that day

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