EDC 3-20-15, and ice fishing.

Ice fishing day trip;

Yes, I ended up a bit redundant, with backups galore… But being 50 miles ouside of my normal territory, for an activity I had never done, ridding with someone else(IE not having my truck and what it carries) and that being an activity that could have turned verry dangerous, I opted for being over prepared instead of under… 😉

Some pics from the fishing trip;

Mt. Denali in the distance;

portable ice hut;

\my buddy augering holes in the 3.5′ of ice… I did one too… That thing works great but its hell on the arms and wrists! (but less hell than a hand auger would be no doubt, I’m sure!)

No, we didn’t catch anything. We were only on the ice about 1.5 maybe 2 hours…

Went out before dawn, to Birch Lake where my friend has fished before, and where there is a road open across the lake.   So, this started out with driving out into the middle of a lake in the dark.

 The trip basically ended a couple hours later when it was light, and warming up, and that ice was making a LOT of sound as it warmed… More than it should have been making…

He had been out there later in the year before, in warm weather, and never heard it popping and cracking and thundering this bad before, so we got off of it before it decided to Really get serrious about cracking/breaking up…

That ice was about 3′ thick, hard and dry, so to my (admittedly small)knowledge of such things, the odds of it breaking up were pretty dang slim… But also both places on bare clear ice where we drilled to fish, you could see a crack on the surface, and look at it at an angle and see that crack all the way through the ice or at least 2’+ down into it. FREAKY.

Also in one large bare area we were on it was obviously re-frozen previous overflow that was at least a few inches deep when it was water… So at least once already this year it has thawed enough out there to get pretty wet; Not exactly encouraging.. 😉

We opted for the option to get off the lake before it Really got warmed up out, Better safe than take the chance. Especially since we had his 7 or 8 year old daughter along with us… If it had just been us we’d have probable stayed out there longer.

Anyway, that was my new adventure for the week… A little shorter day than we had planned, but it was fun and different all the same!