Colored Ice

Colored Ice

Last month the ice along the shore of Lake Superior was grinding like a giant slushy.  Today it’s tinkling along as far as I can hear, much like the sound of a slowly moving set of tinkling wind chimes.  Thin little bits of ice, long glassy plates of translucent ice, and I am pretty sure I’ve seen every possible ice configuration.

You ever try to figure out what color ice is?  At one angle its black or silver white. I’ve seen ice that is blue as any sky. I’ve driven over black ice, gray ice, and ice with hues of pink from a rising sun.  Ice on fire from the ball of orange setting sun. Ice has a hard color to get my mind around. 

Why this all becomes ice’ingly important is Lake Superior is doling out salmon candy to those patience enough to bobber fish the open water. I get the accidental Looper or steelhead and their fun to catch, but my opinion is at this time of year they taste a bit like a Popple tree.  It’s the salmon I want.  Silver sided coming out of the lake and oh what an orange glow coming out of the oven. 

These past few mornings have been magical. The skip jacks, as we call the smaller salmon start to hit right after the sky goes pink in the east.  The bite lasts until the big lakes winds come up for the day.  Then the slammin' salmon day is over. 

Today it ends with me being blessed with two beauties.  Neither weighs over three pounds.  If I kept track of how many line cleanings between fish, the average in ice scraping would border on the ridiculous to some.  Yet for me, I probably knock as much ice off the end of my nose in any given morning. 

Two geese flute back and forth to each other as they swim past me.  I can’t see any ice forming on the big birds.  I wipe my nose off on my jacket sleeve and wonder how they can be swimming in that liquid refrigerant.

I lay the salmon in the back of my truck in a cooler.  Strikes me as very funny that the fish really don’t need to be in a cooler.  It’s also amazing looking at the sides of the salmon; suddenly they match the very color of the ice.  Ice for today, at least, is the color of salmon.

Trout Whisperer