When I was younger, there was just this fun simplicity of playing on the ice and seeing how thick it is. Of course that was with the full intention of kicking a hole in the ice. With that hole in the ice, it's purpose was so that we could do ice fishing. Now being young, kids at their own ignorance, the thrill of catching fish overcomes all dangers. Not once did it ever occur that we could've fallen through thin ice. How did we test thin ice? You pick up that big rock there and throw it out onto the ice. If it breaks the ice and falls through, it was thin ice. Of course we used that rock to break through the ice to make a hole too. More often than how we realized, we did get splashed with water through that process. It's incredible how strong two inches of solid ice was to us kids. What we kids have done often was stealing our father's chisels, axes, and post digging shovels to accomplished the job. Fortunately the ice has always been thick enough and solid enough for us kids and was often more than two inches.
Now we didn't actually have ice rods back then, so it was often no more than some line wrapped around a soup can or a plastic bottle. Eventually it comes to having a broken rod tip glued onto a dowel or piece of scrapped framing wood. The days of hammering two nails onto that wood to hold the line was an adventure in itself. Our creativity went from taking tools and hardware from our fathers to taking tools and hardware from our mothers too. Those empty spools of sewing thread were the core of spools for our fishing line. The homemade makeshift fishing reels were born from long nails, washers, and a lot of wood drilling and shaping to get a crude machine that rusted often from those steel nails. Who knew that mastering some line wrapped around a soup can or plastic bottle was actually more efficient that making a crude fishing reel. It would've been years later that we should've realized that if we spray painted them soup cans, they would've easily lasted another 10 yrs or so. Of course the plastic bottle was the preference as since it floats readily if a fish were to take it and we could put some rocks into plastic bottle to make noise to alert us. By then we were using some cheapo pegged fishing rods. Even so by then ice rods were available for a small cost too and everyone I knew were already surpassed me in gear. I was using my telescopic fishing pole for ice fishing then, by only pulling out the first few sections, and taped the bottom few down.
Fast forward to the young and daring adult, first ice was a memory of catching that one big bluegill. For whatever the reason, we also knew that when there's been signs of lots of ice holes, it also meant there's only small fish left. Again we were still repeating our childhood insanity of not even the concern of falling through thin ice. We also knew that we didn't have the tools to drill ice holes as we often used the left over holes from others as the ice season progressed. How many times have we been out there, just freezing, just to catch nothing? So often, that it's not a memory worth any details anymore. However those memories of catching that one big bluegill from early ice was always there. Now we wonder why there aren't any big rocks left to chuck out onto the ice. Maybe some kids already thrown out all the big rocks onto the ice from years ago.
Eventually the tools came around and how we take turns with the hand auger. The hand auger wasn't too bad around first ice, but what's bad about it was when there was no snow on the ice. We just more than often just spun ourselves around and we remedied it with another person putting their foot against the hand drilling person's foot as an anchor. Which worked out fairly well, but with the hindsight nowadays I still wonder why we never just brought a doormat just to stand on. Anyways I remember how my first ice on the river was and how the cycle of catching that first big walleye replaced the big bluegill. Yes it was like the same cycle. I'm often stopped by passerby asking me how thick the ice was. "Oh, it's three inches, it's safe, " was my reply. "That's not safe!" as what most people would tell me. Again it was that thicker ice essentially meant longer drill time that saps out a person's endurance. Mobility wasn't part of the game plan back then. At most what one person can do is hand drill a few holes for the portable ice shack and maybe a few more to hole hop with mild weather. What first ice memories correlates to was virgin ice. I was still in the process of obtaining my gear and building up my tackle. Whenever I saw another fellow fisherman, we compare a few notes on water depths and ice thickness. Maybe after a few hours compare our catches and more than often we take turns whichever ice hole was open.
