My buddy Mike and I took a ride to Bennington today for Free Fishing Day in VT.
We picked up our bait at Marty's Bait around 9 AM. Friendly guy, good bait, good prices.
(You need to use shiners purchased from a VT bait dealer to fish in VT, and Marty's the only game in town in the Bennington area).
We drove to Lake Paran, which is a mid-sized (40 acres?) but fairly deep (20 feet) pond with about a foot of hard white ice.
We parked in the southern lot and set up about half way out to the opposite shore around 9:30 AM.
It was cloudy most of the day, with temps hovering right around freezing, and was fairly windy off and on.
There were about 5 other groups of guys out fishing on the Lake during the course of the day, plus one pretty brunette iceskater and a bunch of people who came to watch the "Penguin Plunge" (the first one I've ever actually seen) below the Pavilion on the opposite shore.
Considering it was the first time Mike and I had ever ice-fished Lake Paran (although I had fished it from shore once, without success, during the open water season about 10 years ago), we did pretty well.
We caught a mix of crappie (which Mike landed jigging) and one tiny perch (ditto) plus a couple bass aand a small (18" - 20") pike on tipups.
Nothing to write home about, but not too bad considering we were newbies and fishing the place "cold" without any prior recon.
The other groups of fishermen out on the Lake seemed to be doing more or less about the same as us in terms of action, although we did see one guy hook a nice (30+"?) pike only to lose it at the hole.
To pass the time, we chatted with our "neighbors" and folks who walked out from the Penguin Plunge.
We also came loaded for bear in terms of packing for lunch.
We opened with a black bean/chicken/rice/vegetable soup and CAMEL BURGERS with A Ras-El-Hanout spice mix.
I also brought along a lamb chop with a side of kimchi, and fried some potateos, washed down with some homemade grape/sumac wine for a main course.
Not to be outdone, my buddy Mike cooked up some roast pork, with brocolli, carrots and cauliflower, which I also sampled.
We also had a hot pot of coffee and a thermos of strong black tea. All in all a great meal, although I was disappointed the leftover cappucino cheesecake I had brought along for dessert had gone bad.
An interesting body of water, and defintely worth exploring with a kayak during the open water season.
Lake Paran has a reputation as a trout pond - - they supposedly stock 1,500 trout in it during the spring, according to the locals - - but we did not see any evidence of them today.
The trout were probably eaten by the pike. More than a few of the guys we talked to showed us cell phone photos of huge pike that they or their buddies had hauled out earlier in the season.
The locals also told us about Gale Meadows in one of the next towns over, which supposedly has some lunker bass.
