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Dark House With a Lighted Basement
I never did much of the kind of ice fishing depicted in the photo to the right, which shows my brother Jim on the shallow waters of West Leaf Lake in Otter Tail County in north central Minnesota. It was a bright, warm day in March 1972, but it’s not the kind of light I had in mind for the title for this month’s group writing theme.
I presume Jim was fishing for crappies or bluegills, as it would have been out of season for walleyes, bass, or northern pike. My favorite kind of ice fishing was dark house spearfishing for northern pike. The photo below, taken the previous winter on the same lake, depicts a scene from that activity. Even though days are short in early January, when this photo was taken, the scene probably wasn’t as dark as this deteriorated photo makes it appear. I like it, though, partly because of the mood it evokes and because it shows family members who didn’t care much for ice fishing getting in on the fun of moving the fish house or dark house (either term was used) on a sledge to a new location on the lake. Any new location had to be chosen carefully, as it could be a bit of a production to move. In the photo I see myself, Dad, my two sisters, and perhaps one cousin. My guess is that some of them were glad to get outside for a little fresh air and exercise and then went back home when the actual fishing started.
There wouldn’t have been room for all of them inside anyway. The dark house was a 4-by-6-foot structure with 2 by 2 stud walls with a wooden floor on top of a 2 by 4 floor frame. It was comfortable enough for two, but there was only one hole of 2-by-2-feet square for spearfishing. A little shoebox-sized wood-fueled stove occupied some of the space, and when it got good and hot, one wouldn’t want to sit too near it.
Another common size was 4 by 8, and the one belonging to the friend who taught me about spear fishing when we moved to Minnesota was just 4 by 4. That one was easier to move, but was a tight fit for two people.
I have seen and heard of much larger fish houses, but those weren’t generally outfitted for spearing. They might have several smaller holes for fishing with a jig, like the one my brother had in the first photo. They might even have bunks, cooking facilities, a well-stocked cooler, and propane heat. There wasn’t usually much danger of a heated fish house melting the ice beneath it, what with heat rising and an air space below the floor, but one would sometimes hear about one of those fancy ones sinking into the melted ice beneath it after the heat was left on for days on end.
The deadline for removing them was sometime in February. The Department of Natural Resources didn’t want them staying out on the lakes until the ice was too rotten to safely remove them and then littering up the shoreline and lake bottom. That’s why in the first photo my brother was sitting out in the open. Even though the lakes may still be ice-covered into April or May, all fish houses had to be removed from the lakes before March. The best spearfishing conditions were over by then anyway, as will be explained later.
After moving the fish house to a new location, a hole had to be chopped in the ice, usually a little larger than the 2-by-2-foot hole in the fish house. In the photo below, it looks like I’m the person who chopped around the edge with an ice spud, with one of my brothers helping and my mother and youngest sister watching on. Once the chunk was loose, it was good to have a pair of ice tongs to pull it out, but I don’t think we ever had one. We probably just broke it up into pieces that we could flip out and cleaned up the remainder with a little ice strainer.
That worked well enough early in the season if the ice was only 6 to 8 inches thick, but what works in one set of conditions might not work so well in another.
When we first moved to Minnesota and my friend (the one with a 4 by 4 fish house) invited me spearfishing, the ice on this same lake was over 4 feet thick. His father cut out a square hole with his chainsaw to the depth of the saw chain. Then, after we chipped up the ice and threw it out of the hole, he jumped into the hole and cut to another chainsaw depth. I was getting nervous for him at that point, but after we chipped that ice out, there were still a few inches to go, which we chipped out with a spud.
After the hole was cleaned out, we’d position the fish house on the hole. On subsequent expeditions to the fish house, it would suffice to chip out the new ice from inside with a spud. That was much easier than moving the whole thing to a new location.
I don’t claim to be an expert on all of this, by the way. There may be people on Ricochet who know more about this stuff than I do. I’m just telling about my own lived experience, so to speak. I didn’t learn about dark house spearfishing until I was a sophomore in high school. After college, I moved away from Minnesota. For many years until recently, nonresidents were not eligible for spearfishing licenses. My memories are from high school and college Christmas breaks, and not even all of those.
I was a little surprised to see that the date on the second photo above was January 1971, because by then I was a resident of Illinois. Maybe the fishing license I had got the previous year was still good for the entire winter. Or maybe I was just helping to move the fish house for others to use.
The most memorable season was Christmas break of 1966-67. The ice conditions were good that year. Sometimes I would have to unthaw the lock on the fish house to get inside, but after I got a fire started in the stove, I was soon stripped down to my T-shirt (and some guys would strip down further than that). Even if it was minus 20 outside, it was shirtsleeve weather inside. There would be Christmas carols or other music on the transistor radio that would sit on a shelf.
And this is where the light would come in. I’d put a fish decoy on a line, lower it into the water, hang it over the hole, and watch. Because it was dark inside the fish house, one could see what was happening under water. There was enough sunlight that passed through the ice to light up the first several feet of water as well as the lake bottom if the spot was shallow enough, as good northern pike habitat usually was. I would mainly be watching for northerns, but there might be other fish or invertebrates that would come along too. Life was good.
There wasn’t much to do other than keep the spear ready and work the decoy line a little to make it swim in a circle. Move it too vigorously, and a big northern might rush in, smash the decoy from the line, and carry it off before there was time to react. Or a big northern that was wise in the ways of the world might realize it was fake. Move it not at all, and it might not get a fish interested. So patience and a little technique were required. Work it just right, and maybe a big northern would glide in slowly to investigate. Then it would be time to drop the spear on it right behind the gills. I think we used a five- or seven-tined spear. The ones I see in some YouTube videos about dark house spearfishing seem a lot bigger than the ones we used. It was important that the spearhead be in the water when you let go so it wouldn’t splash and scare the fish off. There was such a thing as missing the target, especially if you got excited and felt the need to throw the spear hard or weren’t patient enough to let the fish come close.
The technique could be deadly to northerns, but the limit was only three per person per day.
If no northern pike came at all, all was not lost because it was relaxing to just sit and watch the lighted underworld.
Later in the winter, when the ice got thicker and/or more snow piled up on the ice, not so much light got through, and it was not so interesting.
Some years there would be a thin layer of ice followed by a heavy early snowfall. It might not block the light too much, but it made it difficult to walk out to the fish house because the weight of the snow would push the ice down. Water would come up and form a layer between the ice and the snow, and the water would stay unfrozen even in minus 30 temperatures because of the insulating layer of snow. The water might not come over your overshoes, but it’s always nicer to walk on solid ice than step through snow and water before your feet reach a very slippery layer of ice. Wherever you stepped, the water would soon freeze solid, so a couple trips back and forth to the fish house would give you a solid path to walk on. But even then, it was very easy to slip off such a path. One thing such conditions did was keep the snowmobiles off the lake, as the water would freeze in the snowmobile tracks and bring them to a halt. Those winters, the lakes were quieter. But it also made it very difficult to move a fish house. When you did, you first had to chip it loose from the layer of ice that had come up and encased it.
You couldn’t count on ideal conditions of light and dark or snow and ice to come every year. But the good years are to be savored.
I think I have a photo somewhere of Mrs. R fishing inside a fish house. But I’m not sure where it is, and it didn’t involve any spearfishing. I do have a couple of my dad’s photos of Jim and me with our prey, though, both taken on that best of all winters of dark and light, 1966-67.
I didn’t learn until today. Cool stuff.
Tip-ups I’ve done, including on the Mississippi near Galena, but never spearfishing.
Man, it was cold that winter. The cabin we slept in was heated, sorta, but the condensation from our breath froze at the edges of the door overnight. We had to chip our way out in the morning.
Interesting post. I don’t know how y’all stand all that cold. I’m freezing just looking at the pictures and it’s 65 degrees here at 7am.
I’d never heard of lake ice as being or getting “rotten.” It’s a good word!
It was decades after I’d lived in upstate New York that I heard of winter snow persisting into spring described as “dirty dishes” or “unmade bed.” It had sure looked like one or the other!
The attraction of fishing from a fishhouse (whether spearfishing or not) is that it’s warm and cozy inside. I remember a couple of occasions when cold wind made it uncomfortable to walk out to the fishhouse, though. One time the radio said the windchill temperature was -78F. Jim almost got a frostbitten ear on our walk back to the north shore (the direction from which the wind came) to get back to the car. The ear had a bit of a sickly greenish color for a while, but healed OK. A few years ago after he told that story again, his wife asked me if that was really true. I assured her that that story really happened as he described it. But then I looked it up and learned that sometime when I wasn’t looking, probably about the time that weather reporters started using the annoying and misleading term “feels like,” the way of calculating wind chill changed, so a much more modest number would be assigned to the same wind chill now. I think the air temperature was around -20F, though, which is cold no matter what kind of wind accompanies it. And I remember one walk out to one of Dad’s friend’s fishhouses on another lake when the temperature was -30F and there was a bit of a breeze to accompany it. We never took off our coats even with a fire going inside that fishhouse. Didn’t get any fish, either.
When the lake freezes, the ice forms a nice, solid crystalline structure. Towards spring, after gunk and maybe some windblown dirt has accumulated on the ice, and repeated thawing and refreezing of the top layer, the ice is different and seems to form a more uneven, “rotten” structure that wouldn’t hold the same load. Where there was a good solid structure earlier in the winter we would often drive our cars out onto the ice, if there wasn’t a lot of snow to get us stuck. But toward spring it might not be safe to drive on the same thickness of ice.
One of Dad’s fishing and hunting buddies had an 80-year-old father who pushed his luck with a snowmobile and went down near shore, where the first melting usually occurs. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when there is a layer of new snow on top. He made his way out and went home to dry himself, and was soon as good as new. I think he left his son with the job of winching the snowmobile to shore.
I never met the old man, but when I first met the son he was talking about bear hunting he had done, and eating the bear meat. My mother asked, “Bear meat? What does that taste like?” “About like dog,” he replied. One year when I was in college Dad went hunting with him and ended up with a young bear that ended up in the freezer, all in the form of hamburger. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good, either.
I like seeing pictures of people ice fishing. I feel like if they’re doing it, I don’t have to.
I learned to ice skate just well enough to accommodate my New England-raised father’s winter predictions. Otherwise being outdoors around frozen water is to be generally avoided.
I have family members who travel to one of PA’s most obscure locations for a 2-minute toboggan ride down a steep hill onto a frozen lake so they then then enjoy a long Dr. Zhivago-like trudge back up the hill. The track is made of ice cubes carved from the frozen lake below by the volunteer fire department as a fund raiser.
https://youtu.be/N9pNmJs8fo8
Looks like fun. A long toboggan ride like that would not be something to be missed.
When I was in 1st and 2nd grade at a one-room Lutheran school above the Missouri River valley in North Dakota where the Garrison Dam was being built, during a lunch break there was time for one (1) sled or toboggan ride down to the valley bottom (probably the 2nd or 3rd bottom, i.e. not near the river) followed by a long walk back up the hill. It was worth it. I’m pretty sure it was nowhere near a two-minute ride down, though. I’ve wished I could stand on that place and take a look to see how it compares with my memory, but there are now private residences that keep one away from the spot where the school once stood.
Here’s a photo of the school taken a couple of years after it closed its doors for good. What I don’t have is a photo looking in the other direction, overlooking that long hill down to the bottom of the valley. Maybe it wouldn’t seem quite as long to me now as it did then.
I LOVE this post! Thank you for the pictures and the words that articulate the Minnesota ethos, at least of that time in the Cities, and still permeates the wider icy plains and hidden fishing holes in Greater Minnesota today. Those are where snowmobile suits are still part of the daily wardrobe and ice fish houses still more closely resemble out-house sheds than the glamping McIcemansions popular with those who need heat (and they call themselves real Minnesotans!). Thanks again from Minneapolis, where this morning’s 9 degrees made yesterday’s -8 seem downright balmy.
Question: In the last picture, where you are holding two fish, are you holding them by the eye sockets? Is this typical? I am used to holding fish by the gill or lower lip (unless they have Teeth!) Which I suspect pike do…
Nice story and photos.
Thank you. Yes, I’m holding them by the eye sockets. I don’t know if it’s typical. It’s just something I would do sometimes. Holding them by the gill would work, too, and might work better with larger ones like the one my brother was holding. Dad’s note on the photo slide says the one I was holding was a bit less than 6 lbs.
Yes, pike have teeth. Lots of them, and sharp ones, too!
Thank you. If a Minnesotan recognizes it, it means I have gotten at least some of it right.
When we moved back to Minnesota in late 1973, I thought it was funny when one of the girls in a church youth group outing complained that her earring was caught on her snowmobile suit. Yup, we were definitely back in Minnesota.
I remember spearfishing for pike with my grandfather in the 1950’s from an ice shanty (as we call them in Michigan). He would jiggle the bait and we would take turns spearing the pike. The most exciting day I remember we had speared two or three pike when this huge head that looked as big as a submarine slowly coasted into view with an enormous body following. I was frozen in place but my grandfather got in a good spear thrust just behind the head. With a mighty stroke of its tail the fish zipped out of sight. When grandfather pulled up his spear, all of the tines were bent like pretzels. He pointed at the tines and said, “Well Mickey, this is why it’s probably a good idea to not try and spear a sturgeon, they are armor plated like tank.” The one and only time I’ve seen a sturgeon.
This enlightening winter fishing tale is part of our December theme: “Winter Lights and Dark Winter Nights.” January’s theme is “The Time When Life Changed.” Resolve to sign up and write this month.