Today I saw the first ice fisherman out on the local lake. If there is two inches of ice I would be surprised. Two days ago there was someone shooting ducks off the same lake. Monday, the lake was clear of ice due to wind piling it up on the shore.

I can't believe some people put catching a fish over not only their own lives but the lives of those who would be called to save the fool. I was called upon to handle these emergencies a few times in my career and I never let the opportunity pass to give the survivors (not all lived) an earful of how stupid they were. I get there can be unforeseen occasions such as pressure ridges, schools of carp, and other factors causing sudden thin ice but a few days of cold weather does not make for safe ice.

I texted my neighbor about the guy as my neighbor is on the volunteer fire dept. I told him to let me know if there was a call and I would grab my ice rescue bag and meet him at the lake. We might be able to get a rope on the guy before he goes under and make body recovery less dangerous.

Just let "stupid" take care of itself.

He's probably been icing all of his life and "knows" how thick ice needs to be to be safe.

Yea, 2". Probably not safe.

He uses a calendar to base his knowledge of the ice thickness. Everyone else uses a tape measure and a thermometer.

How many vehicles do they loose a year up there that are parked out on the ice?

I've seen open water turn into 5 inches in 2 nights. Unles you walk out and drill a hole, you have no clue how thick the ice is. If you cant tell if it's safe from the truck, you cant tell if its unsafe either.

He sounds like the guy who went ice fishing and caught 100 pounds of ice. Then his wife drowned trying to cook it! People dumb enough to live where water gets solid are probably a couple of cans short of a six pack in the first place!
Jerry

Curious what 'schools of carp' have to do with this.

Six pack is gone. We drank it ice fishing.

Carp flatulence...

“Stupid is as stupid does”.....& it will.

IIRC AK Troopers had a poster saying that 1” was safe to walk on, 2” to drive a Snowmachine, and 8” to drive a car. I always preferred at least 6” before even getting on it at all.

Sometimes the herd thins itself.

Well, that's generally the problem - it ain't their first 6 pack.

I don't like to sweat all that much- I'll keep winter. If it ever gets here.

I can always add more clothes. When yer nekkid and sweating, there ain't any more to come off.

mid- 30's, but the freezing rain turned to snow. Melting snow, slush. gonna be fun when it freezes tonight. I'm home, and staying there!

From my point of view, people who live where you do have fired mush for brains for several months of the year. So there!

Image result for safe ice thicknesswww.almanac.com
If your reading is at least four inches, proceed with caution. Ice more than five inches thick will likely hold a snowmobile, and ice more than eight inches thick will likely support a car or small pickup truck.

Salt water ice is more flexible or "plastci" and "tougher". An inch will hold a person as long as one shuffles across the lead real fast. It bends real good before breaking. Usually. Probably. Most of the time. Pretty good percentages, tho. No need to ask me how I know....

And don't come back the same way.

Also curious about the carp factor

Large schools of carp finning under the ice can thin it .

Carp suck.

But I think it is related to turbulance caused by large schools of fish stirring up deeper, warm water and thinning the ice above. An underwater spring can do the same thing- or a bit of a drainage channel off a nearby hill, along the shore (ask me how I know this, too- Arctic experience.- but I have a fast throttle thumb!)

Best to stay off shore a bit. On fresh water, especially.

I'm happy to live in a place where lake ice thickness isn't an issue. If you got to take a post hole digger fishin',.....fuggit,....I'll pass.

Settin' there wrapped up like Nanook of the North,.....watching a fishing line hanging down in a hole through 3 feet of ice thinking,..."Something's about to bite,...I just *know* it!"

,...nah,...

Y'all are just bitter cause your neighbor won't let you fish.

6 feet. We deemed the ice safe. Ice auger extensions are da bomb!

Them 35 lb shee fish are worth eating... . It's why God or maybe Conoco made gasoline.

What kinda damn hole you got to drill through 6' of ice to pull a 35 lb fish out of it?

,...two people wrestling a big ass auger,.....one person standing aside holding a fishing pole saying, "Hurry up! Daylight only last 45 minutes this time o'year!"

I'm sorry,....but that just sounds depressing as hell.

I saw guys icefishing in Columbus, Mississippi. They were from MN and stationed at the base. The ice was maybe 3.5" white and clear combined.

Icefishing is like lots of other things. Spend money to get the proper gear, gather some knowledge, you will have a great time and get some great eating filets.

Your cork obviously doesn't float quite right, Bristoe...

10" ice- bits are the norm - and sometimes that's a tight fit (shee fish can get to 50 lb). I'm missing it already, having moved south awhile back.

The first time I went shee-fishing, I had 7 fish in 30 minutes or less. If they are biting, "45 minutes" is plenty. I have headlights on the snowmachine. Even on the shortest days 500 miles farther north (Barrow) , one has 4 or 5 hours of semi-lilght. the sun is only below the horizon for 5 weeks or so there.. In Kotzebue, 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where this pic was taken, it's only a few days - and a good 6 or 7 hours of "light".

As Staley Foster, an Eskimo who showed me how and took this picture for me said, "It ain't always like this!" He had about 15 fish by that time (better spoon) , and hang the nominal daily limit of 10.

True, there were less productive times... but when you can walk on water, it's all good.

Yeah,....but they were safe,...'cause in Mississippi people only fish off a bridge.

. You're on a roll Bristoe!

And some minor corrections to your perceptions.

Ice augers can be handled by one person tho 2 isn't too many - even through 5 or 6 feet of ice. It is interesting because it bites well until the last 6 inches or so, where the sea ice has more salt content and is more plastic. One definately can feel when it's about to break through. Me - I didn't have an auger, but I borrowed one from someone out there sometimes- usually they would even drill a hole for me. Most times, I just used a used hole - look for the bloodiest one...

Dunno about freshwater ice, but probably not on the break-through thing.

Shee fish (tom cod, and maybe some others up the rivers) are jigged, or caught in under-ice nets. The traditional Eskimo jig-stick is a curved spruce root 12-14 inches long. I just cut a piece of plywood and notched the ends. - works just as well. Jigs are usually "Docktor" spoons about 5-6 inches long. I used 50 or 80 lb dacron line, as do most. No need for a leader, but a swivel or swivel snap is necessary. Preferably a locking swivel snap.

But when they are biting, anything works, from a Daredevil, or generic knock-off, to a halibut jig of about the same size. I experimented. When they aren't biting, nothing works. a co-worcer made a jig out of a table knife handle. Worked.

In between....it varies.

This was one of those "you should have been here yesterday" days. Neither of us caught anything in 6 hours out there, but the ravens were cleaning up the leavings from the day before. A bad day of fishing beats the best day at work....

Years ago our fire department got called to pull two Darwin candidates out of the water in March. They rowed their boat out to a floating ice island to ice fish on it. Myself and another guy in SCUBA gear and dry suits left our Zodiac boat, went underwater under the ice for about 200 feet to pop up with them in their hole in the middle. They were pissed when we wouldn't go back out to get their buckets, cooler, and tip-ups....

My favorite ice-fishing story comes from the mid-west - Wis, or Mn probably.

Where they cut trenches in the ice.

Couple guys were working the anti freeze pretty good in their shack. A shack or two over someone hooked and lost at the surface a fish. Lab dives in after it, but comes up in the tiplers's hole.

They took the door right off....

Hey, we got ice in the pot holes here.

My friendand i watched a muskrat go into a porty. We waited for it, AHHHHHH! It was hilarious. Them dudes ran for their lives, screaming like girls.

Muskrats ain't to be under-rated. In HS, my brother and our two best friends were fishing, anchored out in the mouth of Knife River, ND. Hot day- we were in swim trunks. A two family group of muskrats came swimming across.

We thought it a good idea, soon disabused, to net a couple of the kits. The adults came aboard. Who knew those little bastids could jump 2 feet out of the water?

We left them the boat.... first smart move we made.

Edit: I should add - it was unanimous, without a word spoken! Pretty much every man for himself, in all different directions.

I like walking on water...

This^^^^.

Ice is for bourbon.

Works for fish flavored bourbon also - you can't get that just anywhere...

I'm wiling to bet ice thickness was not 5" yesterday, at least not past shore. It could have been 2" out to a couple hundred feet from shore but that is getting pretty trusting for holding 300 pounds of person and equipment. I've been playing on frozen water in one form or another for 45+ years and determined long ago there is no fish out there worth my life and certainly not the lives of those who will be called upon to drag my butt out of the hole.

Looking back over my career, I've been on 7 successful ice rescues and 3 body recoveries as a career firefighter and 2 successful and 3 recoveries as a volunteer. 2 of the three successes of the latter occured when others were able to get a rope looped over the victim and hold him above the ice until help arrived. Without that the person would have likely drowned.

As for carp thinning ice, it has been mentioned already. I believe both are correct depending on water depth and number of carp. The carp seem to prefer shallower, more protected waters over main lake areas in the winter but that may be skewed if they do not cause thinning in such areas.

Not as many vehicles go in as one might expect. There are pretty significant fines regarding this and they can accumulate by the day until the vehicle is removed rather than the incident. Mitigation of contaminants is also added to the fines if necessary. Plus, most insurance companies do not cover going through the ice unless certain conditions are met. So, the financial aspects of dropping a vehicle through the ice limits the number of times this happens rather than common sense.

Two people on a 10 inch auger? have never seen that, always drill where there's snow stuck to the ice even when wearing cleats. If you try that on glare ice get a dufus look on your face, smile bigly and wave 'cus someone will whip out a phone and video you spinning around the stationary auger.

We get that grab before busting through. When you feel it start to grab raise it up a few inches, let the RPMs build, and plunk it back down while holding tight. Or sharpen the blades. Drilling holes is fun. I'll Swiss cheese an area over structure and move until I find the right depth.

Ice is not for walking, riding nor driving on.

there's a polar bear sneakin up on ya

By January you can land heavy aircraft on the lakes here if they aren't snowed up.

I sold all my ice fishing gear two years ago. It was getting so that we had ice I considered safe only about two months to 10 weeks or so, and that was with it being sketchy at both ends. I didn't like to go out if it was less than four inches because of the very real chance of thin areas near springs and such.

Some of the highest lakes are already fishable here, but none of the lower ones are. Normally, they've got at least a skim by now, but we're under what seems like a perpetual Indian summer this year. It's 42° at 8 a.m. today, and will hit 55°. I have a golf tee time in an hour. Won't even need a jacket. And it'll be like this at least another week.

When I lived in Alaska a buddy and I decided to head out to his cousins place for a visit. The road in is impassable in winter due to a steep ice covered hill. When we got there it was slick so we went around to the winter route, which was crossing the frozen lake. When we started across in the truck we noticed everyone came out of the house onto the front lawn. Look at that, they came out to greet us!

When we got across to the house we proudly drove up onto the lawn and climbed out. First thing one of them said, "You're the first ones across, we weren't sure you were gunna make it".

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As a person (16 year old kid) who has fallen through ice on the Mississippi river (back channel) it was one scary as hell moment!

I heard the ice crack and was instantly waste deep in water. i broke ice all the way to the bank (about 6 feet) and by the time I got out my buddy was starting a fire... There I was rotating in front of bonfire wearing only my underwear with wet clothing hanging on brush..

Needless to say, neither one of us told our folks!!! My best buddy and I practically lived on the river all four seasons. The "good old days" of youth!

The dude showed up with a buddy this afternoon, my neighbor said they made it about 100 feet before breaking through. The guys were able to break their way back to shore but not before the police, sheriff, ambulance, and my neighbor got there. The one complained of chest pain and shortness of breath while the other was "just" hyperventilating. Both ended up in the hospital. At least the Fire Dept was cancelled though they will each get a $500 bill for the page.

It was bad enough the one guy walked out there yesterday, bringing out a buddy when temps passed over 32 degrees around 4 AM and was about 36-38 degrees and sunny when they went in is beyond belief. I guess when one passes 70 years old there isn't much to live for - at least for some people.

I wonder if they learned anything from this experience and also wonder if they are the same people who place a plank over open water from shore to the remaining lake ice in the spring. That is something else I have trouble believing.

Sounds north of Eden to me, NH.

Those idiots who drive 18 wheelers on frozen-over lakes on "Ice Road Truckers" have gotta have a couple of screws loose! I guess somebody's gotta do it, but I don't think I'd ever be that desperate for a paycheck!
Jerry

At the same time as those ice road truckers are bailng over the top, I read that the biggest US icebreaker can break through 8' of ice while running at 10 knots. The Russians have a nuke that can do 13'.

When the cold comes it doesn't relent 'til mid-March. But I'm chicken. There was the year I was on early ice with the Explorer behind me. The ice was 10 inches and crystal clear, just like you'd want in your drink. The ice was growing and when it does that it cracks and groans. A lot. Don't know how many times I turned expecting to see the Explorer slowly sink. After that I got got a good deal on an ATV. A friend of a friend drove it into a field approach one night (drunk) and not only had no money for repairs but needed cash to pay for his car insurance(!). But that's another story.

Using a plank to reach solid ice is very common here - and not dangerous at all. What happens is that the lakes begin to rise with incoming water. The ice sheet "fit" the shore with lower water, but as the water rises, the sloped banks create a band of open water or thin ice all around simply because the lake is wider now. Using a plank or ladder between solid shore and solid ice solves the dilemma of how to get across that band.