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What I Learned My First Time Ice Fishing in Alaska
I’ve always wanted to go ice fishing since I was a teenager. My entire childhood was spent outdoors. When I got older and found out all the outdoor things that could be done, there was just always something about ice fishing that pulled me towards it.
When we moved up to Alaska, that was one of the things we said we were going to do no matter what. We were going to figure out how to ice fish, even if we had to hire someone to teach us. Fishing through the ice? Come on! What a thrilling experience!
I am far from the first person to go ice fishing, but as someone who has always wanted to do it and to have made that dream come true this year, it’s truly an exhilarating feeling.
Our friends have a whole ice fishing setup. In fact, that’s basically all he wants to do is fish, year-round. He invited us out to go ice fishing all we had to do was buy the ice fishing poles. They’re like 1/4 the size of a regular fishing pole; they’re adorable!
Setting up the ice fishing tent
His ice fishing tent is large enough to accommodate my whole family. My husband, two daughters and myself got all bundled up and headed out to a nearby lake at around 8am. It was still plenty dark, sun didn’t rise until about 10:45am, so we had plenty of time to get setup and wait for the fish to arrive.
You don’t actually need a tent to ice fish, but it sure does make it more comfortable.
You don’t need an auger to make the holes either, but again, it makes it a whole lot easier and quicker.
We took turns drilling holes, setting up our chairs then placing the ice tent over our stuff. We fired up the buddy heater, dunked our lines in, then, we waited.
Our friend had a fish finder and outside of acting up a couple times, once it decided to work, it was really cool to see the fish going by right under us!
Even without a fish finder, the fish will find you one way or another. They are hungry under that ice! We used shrimp as bait, fish love shrimp, especially because it’s something they can’t get normally, so it’s a delicacy to them which they go nuts for, year-round.
Waiting for the fish
It was fun sitting there and chatting, trying to warm up. The buddy heater made a big difference. It was negative degrees outside but it was a comfortable temp inside of the tent. Not comfortable enough to take off my jacket, but not shivering, either! Comfortable enough to take off my gloves at least.
Since we had our young children there, they were very eager to catch a fish, but at one point we all got really tangled with each other’s lines because the holes were a bit too close together. Lesson learned there! There’s always a lesson to be learned whenever you do anything. You can always fix the string and re-hook some bait.
But also because of our young kids, they got restless after sitting there for a couple hours. Once the sun started to rise, we had to head out.
But, our friends stayed behind. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as we left, the fish started biting and they took home a couple monsters.
This was the biggest lesson of all; patience.
This wasn’t the last time we were going to go ice fishing. We’re hooked now!
A dream come true! And because we didn’t catch anything, it’s even more motivation to go back again and again!
Have you ever been ice fishing?
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