Who would have thought that the ice fishing season is already here? Well, if you ask the real pilkkijät it’s always ice fishing season. Aha!?

Kind of difficult to understand, but let’s grab the matter from what the rest of us consider logical prerequisite for ice fishing: frozen water, lots of thick frozen water. However, the ice fisherman, aka pilkkijä around here, loves his fun and doesn’t even need much of that to go ice fishing.

I think this passion, or recklessness, depending on where you stand, is well illustrated by an ardent pilkkijä I once spoke to. His reply to my question how does he know that the ice is thick enough to go fishing was simple: “If piss melts ice through and through, that’s when I go fishing.” Yeah, but isn’t that also when it’s one centimeter thick, how do you walk on it then? “I crawl!”

Sure enough, pilkkijät are quite nuts. I haven’t seen this gentleman crawl on all fours to the middle of the lake, open his zipper, take a leak and start fishing, but I can easily imagine what it looks like. Or then again I’ve seen these guys sitting on their mini chairs on the middle of a half-frozen lake, but was left scratching my head thinking how the hell they got there. Beam me up Scotty, anyone?

Pilkkijä is the pioneer. He’s right there with the fauna; nothing stands between him and the fish, not even ice. He is always the first and the last to go on the ice. A stubborn and persistent man.

Not everyone makes it there and back, though. “Man drowns falling through the ice” is a headline one can spot almost daily in local papers for weeks every fall and spring as freezing cold weather comes and goes before it settles for good. It seems like these middle-aged men are as restless as small kids.

Last weekend overnight the temperature dropped to around 25C below the freezing point for a few hours and sure enough the local lake was filled with pilkkijät like woods are flooded with mushrooms after the rain. Hm, trying to walk on the ice myself, I quite quickly noticed that cracking on the contours of the shore makes it a bit too scary.

Once you figure out the whole ice thing (or if you are not scared of falling through into the freezing water, which, by the way, is another popular Finnish pastime anyway), then you find out that ice fishing is a childishly simple thing. Equipment is minimal, strong nerves and sturdy muscles are a prerequisite. A bottle of kossu, a drill, a fishing stick, live maggots, and a mini chair (optional) and you’re ready to go.

Sitting it isn’t. You don’t just sit around waiting for the fish to get hooked. Nope, you have to work harder than that. Fish hardly move in the freezing cold water, so you have. Once a hole is drilled through meter plus thick ice (in winter, that is), you dip the bait and wait for a minute. Nothing? Get your ass up, walk a few meters, drill, dip, wait. Nothing? Repeat. And repeat you can, drilling sometimes even more than a hundred holes on a single fishing trip.

But once you drop your bait into the middle of the school, well then you just hope your hands are not too tired from the drilling. All you’ll do now is wind up, take fish off the hook, dip, wind up, detach, dip, wind up, detach. And it’s not unusual to catch from 10 to 20 kilograms. Now that’s a lot of fish if they are between 10 to 15 centimeters long.

It takes about 30 seconds to drill a hole through a meter thick ice, so you quite easily spend a quarter of your fishing trip drilling through frozen water. Now that makes sense why pilkkijät prefer no ice at all and rather go ice fishing in the summer when there’s no ice in sight. Ice and drill are obviously not necessary then, but you do need a large, flat piece of floating material with a hole in the middle and off you go ice fishing with cold beer instead of lukewarm kossu in your hand.

Just be careful when taking a leak, it can be just as deadly as falling through the ice.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Culture, Finland, Leisure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.