The Iceman Fisheth
The winter of 2015 refused to loosen its grip. As a result, cold-weather passions that have lain dormant in recent years returned with a vengeance in the Northeast.
Ski resorts upstate and in New England have not seen so much snow in years. Iceboats have been dragged out of storage and onto Long Island lakes and ponds. One of the more intense winter passions is the otherworldly sport of ice fishing.
On Sunday morning, Fort Pond in Montauk was a quilt of snow patches and smooth ice. On the ice, not far from the Kirk Park dock, lay the charred remnants of a hand-warming fire, home base for skaters the day before. You could almost smell the hot chocolate.
Two men, Devon Grisham and Kyle Fagerland, stood looking down out in the middle of the pond. Again and again, Fagerland’s dog, Shelby, retrieved a ball, slipping and skidding, never tiring of the winter version of her favorite sport.
“Fishing is my life,” said Grisham, a janitor at East Hampton High School. “Saltwater is not for me. This is more challenging.”
It was early and he had already bored four eight-inch-diameter holes in the ice with his gas-powered auger and was in the process of setting his “tip-ups,” a spring and flag combination that’s attached to a fishing line whose terminal gear, this day, consisted of live bait and bread bait.
The contraption sits atop a wooden crosspiece that spans the hole. The spring, like the kind on a screen door, is bent down and locked to a trigger mechanism. Think mousetrap. When a fish strikes, the spring springs and the small flag flips skyward to alert the fisherman, who is most likely off drilling another hole.
“As soon as the flag pops up, I’m running,” Grisham said.
He told me how ice fishing had hooked him starting at age 8. His father introduced him to it, he said, as he pulled a sled filled with the sport’s accoutrements along the ice to the next hole. He took one of the small fishing rod-and-reels from the sled and lowered the line into the hole in a process called “sounding,” that is, determining how far the surface of the ice — it’s at least six inches thick these days — was from the bottom.
He said he was preparing the holes and setting the tip-ups in anticipation of his father’s arrival with baitfish purchased at a tackle shop in Riverhead. “When my bait gets here — ahh. I can’t wait.”
Grisham said he was hoping to catch walleye, or largemouth bass, but would also be going for carp, a vegetarian fish that will go after bread bait. Carp grow to well over 10 pounds in the pond.
“I don’t kill any of the fish I catch,” he said, although, in his opinion, carp should be culled from local freshwater bodies. They tend to crowd out other species. “Hook Pond used to be my favorite, but it’s filled with carp now.”
Grisham said he also works Fresh Pond (also called Hidden Pond) in Hither Woods, Montauk, where, he said, a friend had caught a “three-pound bass and a four-pound pickerel” through the ice the day before.
“My favorite is Fresh Pond in Southampton,” he said, although Southampton was proprietary about its freshwater. While fishing in most freshwater bodies on Long Island is managed for all state residents by the State Department of Environmental Conservation, Southampton keeps theirs for locals only.
A resident permit is required, although a “plus one” that accommodates a visitor is available, and outsiders are able to hire a local guide to take them fishing. Grisham said he was aiming at getting a guide license, as well as a freshwater bass boat. That’s the big, expensive dream, and when it comes true, he will take the boat “all over.” He already knows many of New York’s freshwater fishing haunts.
I left him as he prepared a “live well” in the ice by using his auger to drill several connecting holes halfway through the ice, then punching a small hole through to the water. The water fills the well, and the well holds the fish until photos can be taken and they’re released.
Snow began to fall hard Sunday afternoon. I returned late in the day. I could barely make out two figures, one kneeling, one standing — Devon Grisham and his dad. I walked out. A string of holes stretched across the pond and it was getting dark. No fish had been caught. Devon’s dad was ready to call it a day. Devon said, no, not yet.
It was clear, as the snow fell like a white shroud on the pond, that Devon’s hope that the tip-up’s red flags would spring to attention springs eternal.