Hi all,

I had a fun and interesting activity today that was "survival training" related and thought I would share it on the Forum.

Today my work partner and I had the assignment to do some on-ice inventory on one of the large, heavly utilized tourist lakes in the area. The area was accessed by snowmobile and we had good weather, about 0*c and partly cloudy.

Around noon we left the large main lake and followed a rough trail into a very small adjacent lake, the sun came out as we arrived and we decided it was lunch time.

We parked the sleds amid where someone had been ice fishing yesterday, the holes through the 2 foot thick ice were only froze over about 1 inch. My partner (who is a serious fisherman) said "Duh, we should have brought some rods so we could fish over lunch hour".

I then remembered that in my snowmobile kit I had a small amount of fishing tackle. After some searching I found 2 spools of mono line and 2 small silver jigs, one was a Swedish Pimple, and the other was similar but I do not remember the name. We opened up the holes with an axe and my partner searched around the area for discarded minnows from the day before. He found no bait (the ravens clean that up quick here) so he put a sliver of sliced turkey sandwich meat on the small treble hook. His line was rigged for no more than a 30 seconds and a fish started nibbling at it, after a quick set of the hook he had a 12" long Brook Trout on the ice!

I had not even got my line in the water yet, so I quickly added some sliced ham to my lure, and 4 jigs later I had a twin to his fish flopping at my feet!

We figured we would get our limit easy and continued fishing for about 1/2 an hour, we even tried all the other holes in the area and we did not get another bite (trout are funny like that). So we cleaned the 2 fish and continued on with our work day.

Since it was only my teenage son and I home for supper tonight, I got both fish. I pan-fried the 2 trout and the orange-tinted flesh was delicious, of course my son said he could have eaten 4 more that size.

So, with minimal equipment and a little ingenuity you never know when/where you can find something to eat.

Thanks for listening,

Mike