47 Years Ago, I Caught A Really Big Fish

Sunday, February 13, 1972: I went ice fishing with my father and caught a walleye that we measured as 24 inches long (and 5½ pounds). I was eight years old - and I've never caught a bigger fish.

I love this next photo. I have done nothing to remove the various imperfections, which along with the dull grayness of both the snow on the frozen lake and the sky, gives the picture the feel of some doomed Arctic expedition from the 1910s.

We would get out on the ice around dawn. My father would drill 12-15 holes in a straight line, maybe 30 feet apart. Looking at the space between (what I think is) me in the middle of the frame and the "tip-up" in the foreground gives you an idea of the distance between the holes. (My father built his own tip-ups by hand. I never thought about the name of these things when I was a kid. For all I knew, it was my father's (or a regional) term. Looking online now, tip-up seems to be the general name.)

Having them in a long row made it easy to keep an eye on all the lines. When a fish grabbed the bait, a minnow usually a few feet above the bottom of the lake, it triggered the release of a bright orange flag (which was bent and on a hook of some sort). When you saw a flag had sprung up, or someone else pointed it out, you knew something was going on. And you'd run to the hole.

On exceptionally cold and/or windy days, running to the very end of the row was not fun - though the exercise did warm you up a tiny bit. You often had to break the thin film of ice that had formed over the hole before you could begin pulling up the line (and, hopefully, the fish). You tossed your gloves aside and quickly brought up the cold line with your bare hands. When it was time to re-set the tip-up, the small pile of wet line beside you had usually frozen and it took time to untangle it all. My fingers were often completely numb by the time I could put my gloves back on.

The smaller fish below look like perch.