Downtown Crystal Falls. Sargie took this picture on Sunday afternoon while coming up the hill. That's the court house at the center.

January 2, 2012 – Wednesday

14 degrees/light snow

Pentoga Road

I’m having a dilemma here. I’m not sure what I can write that hasn’t been printed in the past several days. The pictures are also the same; of fish.

I’m suffering from the Popple Syndrome. It’s the same as when I spent the month clearing the acre in back of the house. I’d rise in the morning, do a few household chores, perform some chainsaw maintenance, then spend the rest of the day cutting and chipping popple trees. I wrote of the same activities over and over with similar pictures.

Substitute the word “popple” with “ice fishing” and you’ve got my most recent history.

I rode to Iron Mountain with Sargie on Tuesday and drove the Blazer back. It was very clear and very cold and I was grateful to be out of the bright sun once I arrived home. Even with sunglasses, my eyes felt as though they were being pricked.

Once home, I got busy changing line on one fishing rod and then exchanging lures. I’ve been using a fairy jig, a small lure with fluttering wings meant to attract panfish. After catching the one crappie on Sunday, I started to put the various pieces of the fishing puzzle together.

I’d experienced pulling the jig from fishes’ mouths and just assumed most were bass, fish with big mouths, and the hooks were often too small to connect with their upper or lower jaw. Crappies also have large and soft mouths. I began to wonder if the pull-outs weren’t crappies rather than bass.

While in Iron Mountain on Monday, I purchased two small bodied jigs with large hooks.

Fishing was initially slow on Tuesday. I even changed areas on the lake searching for some sort of hungry aquatic life. Finally, about an hour before sunset, things began to improve and by dark, I’d caught twenty panfish, six of them crappies. The larger hooks definitely worked.

I walked off the lake in the dark, came home, worked up wood, then came inside and began cleaning my catch. I’d barely finished, cleaned the kitchen, and taken a shower by the time Sargie walked in the door. Perfect timing.

After hauling in wood, I was more than happy to settle in for the night.

I’ll go out to the lake this morning as soon as Sargie leaves for work and am planning on being back home before noon. I want to do more work on my classes in preparation for uploading them next week. Spring semester is almost here.

Sargie’s doesn’t have to work Thursday so it will be day filled with honey-do projects. We travel to Appleton, Wisconsin, on Saturday for a niece’s baptism. Somewhere in there, I’ve got to get in front of a television set to watch the Saturday night Packer’s game. It’s a stressful world in which I live. Meat for the table, Packers football; a man’s work is never done.

So are the tales from Pentoga Road…

Can you tell I've been feeding the deer in the back yard?