Pete Collin

I've been really busy with work so no fishing reports to make. But I did do this video for my website that shows how to ID different hardwood species in NY. Maybe some of you will find this interesting.

Steve, you are a menace to fish everywhere!

Boy those chicks fight a lot.

I drained it last fall, am refilling it now. Thanks for the tips.

Hello All, I am getting my boat ready for the season. The local NAPA only had small tubes of lower unit oil. Too small for my two motors. On the same shelf are good sized jugs of oil that is also 80W90 oil, but not labelled for marine use. Are all oils of the same weight and thickness identical? The guys at the store couldn't tell me.

Glad I read the whole story. I almost bolted to go hitch up the trailer!

Nice job Sean. I went XC skiing yesterday, was going to fish today. Wish I did it the other way around.

Dave, Where do you work? Procurement or consulting? There is one other Umaine alumn here in WNY I know about. We used to hit Davis Pond, Pushaw Lake, Alligator lake, and oxbows of the Penobscott. It was fun taking the gazetteer map and scheming about which local pond looked the most promising. No surfing the internet for tips in those days. And you know how tight lipped native Mainers are with fishing advice!

Sean Youngblood made sure I knew the perils of ice fishing Lake Erie. When I asked him if I could come along on a trip to Sturgeon Point, his affirmative reply came with many caveats: the gruelling hike to the perch grounds, the shove-ice barriers, the brutal winds, the fickleness of the quarry. He made it sound like a grim plod up the Khumbu Glacier, without oxygen and towing a sled. I wondered if we would have to rope ourselves together in case yawning cracks suddenly opened in the ice between us. OK, maybe my imagination got away from me. Or maybe lake Erie just went easy on us. Let me back up a bit. I haven't ice fished since 1992. I'd join the easily-assembled posses of fellow college kids and auger holes into any promising body of water within an easy drive of Orono, Maine. A packbasket with some tipups, a pail of minnows, some shared spuds and augers, and we were in business. The pickerel were plentiful, the white perch tasty, the trout and salmon so seldom caught that a single capture was a heralded event. The ice was always so thick that safety was absolute and arm fatigue a certainty. Upon moving to NY, I'd hear about guys setting up on mere inches of ice, within sight of open water. This struck me as so ridiculous that I put ice fishing out of my mind and my tipups got culled from the pile of possessions somewhere during one of many moves. Some Sunday morning Youtube surfing revealed that there is fine panfish sport on Honeoye Lake. In late January, I made a jaunt at that location. Instead of cobbling together some gear and wandering from one jig hole to another, I brought only my cross country skis. I guessed correctly that I would learn much more from seeing the sights and talking to people than I would from clueless trial and error. Ice fishermen are much friendlier to strangers who are not pulling a sled. There were plenty of talkative folks that weekend, and I sussed a great deal about the spots, the quarry, and the tactics. Most were not enjoying too much action, but two young jiggers found the magic spot above a school of willing jumbo perch. They were catching as I passed them both ways, their success topped by a fine walleye that joined the growing pile. You can watch this for only so long without wanting to join the fun. Assembled the following gear: a sawed-off ultralite rod, a cheap old boat graph rigged with lantern batteries, and an iron bar with a skew ground into one end. Trip #1: Honeoye Lake. Tried to find the spot where those two young guys were. Couldn't remember what the houses on shore looked like. Boat graph transducer didn't work. Froze may ass and quit after an hour. Trip #2: Loon Lake. Gave up on fixing the old graph. Blind jigged. Spudding the holes was exhausing. Swooped upon another guy's holes after he left so I wouldn't have to chisel any more. No hits, no idea if any fish were around. Warm sun went away and I froze my ass. Quit after 2 hours. Trip #3. Honeoye lake. New used auger. New quilted coveralls. New 80 dollar boat graph rigged with lantern batteries. (Marcums and Vexilars are nice but Jeez! Five, six hundred dollars for a fish finder? You gotta be kidding me!) Drilled 2 holes with the auger before cranking got real tough and cutting real slow. One of the 2 blades had loosened and fell off. Made do. Jigged a 4 inch perch. The skies parted, the angels blew their trumpets, and my 23 year exile from ice fishing came to an end. Trip #4: Tried for smelt on Canadice Lake. Doggedly drilled a few holes with only one blade. No blips, no action. Looked up from my graph to find it snowing hard. Worried I would get plowed in - truck was already rammed into the unplowed shoulder somewhat. Packed up and left after a couple of hours. Roads terrible. Figured nearby Honeoye Lake was a good place to wait out until the snow passed and the plows did their magic. Boat launch plowed as if done by valets. Jigged until dark. Encouraged by abundance of bottom blips. Worked the lure patiently, carefully, even cleverly. Got 3 taps and one seven inch perch. So I had nowhere to go but up on my trip with Sean. We rode through the dark to Sturgeon Point. I crammed my leggy frame into the shotgun seat of Sean's compact car, inhaling his stories, advice, and second hand smoke. I've written on this website before how I love to meet hard core fishermen, and Sean Youngblood is absolutely one of them. His resume includes bovine sized stripers at Montauk, tarpon at night in Florida, and being so successful as to be ruined for life on brown trout at the Ginna outflow. I know his dad. He replied to my appeal for a boat seat when I had trailer trouble last spring, but Sean and I never actually made a trip together until yesterday. He was clearly the guy to call for some coaching. So the death-march to the first waypoint was actually pleasant. There was no wind at all. The orange sunrise played beautifully over the blue thrusts of shove ice. The bevy of engine jockeys rode a dazzling array of every kind of mechanized vehicle that can carry itself over ice and drifts. (I must say, the sport has changed in my absence. Sure, you'd see the occasional dandy in 1980's Maine with a snowmobile and power auger, but the profusion of paraphernalia has exploded! They reminded me of the Whos in Whoville on Xmas morning). The trail they made eased the tramp around the worst of the shove ice. Yes, it took over an hour of steady marching to make it to the waypoint, but it was way easier than marking timber on snowshoes in the hilly Southern Tier. Sean explained that he really had to test my mettle before we even went. The weather and conditions could have been way worse (as I would later see). You can't take a stranger on a long drive followed by a long walk followed by a long wait for fish only to have him say his toes are cold and he wants to go home! We set up within hailing distance of Sean's friends. They had already landed a walleye or 2. Great. Our first holes yeilded blank screens, but Sean reassured me that Erie fish are always on the move. You jig your hole like an archer on a deer stand. The first few hours gave only a couple of solitary blips. I made a short move and watched my screen. I could get the jig hovering just above the bottom line so there was just a bit of daylight between the two marks. I twitched the lure, occasionally raising it. Suddenly the daylight between bottom and lure blackened. And I got a hit. And cranked. And pulled onto the ice my first jumbo perch - a portly 13 incher. We made a quarter mile move. A big ridge of shove ice blocked passage to the exact spot Sean wanted to go. We each drilled a hole and saw a batch of activity underneath! Sean ran commentary as I cranked the auger for my hole and the lines converged on his flasher. He got a bite and took some time getting his fish in. Out came a marvellous greenish-gray 'eye! I couldn't get my hole skimmed fast enough. What happened next was weird. The blips on my graph vanished as my jig got down to them. Meanwhile Sean began piling up perch after perch onto the snow! It was unnerving. I'd see a blip. It wouldn't move towards my jig and wouldn't stick around. All the while Sean kept adding to his batch. I drilled and jigged to his north. Moving blips that ignored. Drilled to his west. BIG blips that inspected but wouldn't bite. Sean had another good walleye on that came all the way up only to be dumped just below the hole. Sean says that is a walleye specialty. So I got a bit loud with my excited chatter during our photo shoot, so a man and wife team swoops in and sets up just close enough to be impolite. "Pete, you really should keep it down from now on!" It seemed like we were so far from everyone else that the floating city to our east didn't matter. But one bored crew with sharp eyesight and swift transport could trigger an exodus of anglers to our immediate vicinity! Lesson learned. Sean's hole quieted down. We watched listless blips for a few more hours, made a fruitless move, came back to the hot spot, and bounced jigs for a while longer without result. Sean said he was up for fishing past nightfall if I wanted. I decided that, without a flashlight of my own, I'd just as soon walk back by daylight. This is right where things got interesting. While assembling our gear to return, the promised "snow flurry" kicked in. Just as I got into the shoulder straps, visibility fell to about 100 feet around us. It looked the same no matter where you looked. Now, this could have been a big problem for the unprepared. Had I gone out alone, without a compass or GPS, not told anybody where I was, and not taken notice of landmarks on the shore, this could have turned into a very unpleasant night on the ice. As it was, I carried a compass and knew the shot back anywhere on Erie is Southeast. My smartphone had a GPS, Sean had a nautical GPS on his sled. I had made a point of looking over my shoulder on the way out to notice a big cell phone tower near the parking lot to serve as my landmark. I had brought food and was dressed warmly. If it came to that, I would have survived until morning if we got stranded out there. We powwowed about the correct direction back, marched about 40 minutes through the whiteout, and things cleared enough for the shore and cell tower to finally come into view. It wasn't quite over yet. In the dark, we naturally wanted to march straight towards the tower rather than vector around the worst of the shove ice like we had in the morning. Sean could tell that I was skeptical about the need to do so. Well I can testify that plowing through shove ice very taxing. It acts as a snow fence, so the drifts tend to collect around the ridges. Old snow forms a crust that may or may not hold you up with every step. Should you break through, your foot jams against a hard, slick, angled surface that wants to twist your ankle. I was lucky in that my long legs can get around in deep snow more easily, but neither of us was as fresh as 10 hours before. For the last quarter mile, we got chauffered by a compassionate guy with a big quad that fit us and our gear. I actually found the challenge of getting back to be exhilarating in its own way. Part of the satisfaction in being an experienced outdoorsmen is to know that you have the smarts and stamina to get yourself out of potential problems. So now, if you lasted this long, you have read about my entire re-indoctrination to ice fishing. My catch rates are still abysmal. But I sought some new experiences, exercise, and adventure, and found all 3. Can't say how much of a shopping spree my new hobby will foment. I'll probably make a shelter, pick up a few used tipups at the end of the season. Any big purchases on my part will likely trigger an El Nino next winter that has us picking leeks in March. We'll start this new interest off one trip at a time. At the moment, I am eager for my next! www.pcforestry.com

Where are you located?

Les, I brought the graph indoors. Once warmed up, the transducer works fine and you can hear it happily clicking away. Some graphs just can't handle cold, it seems.

So I haven't ice fished since i was in college over 20 years ago. last weekend I went XC skiing on a nearby finger lake and had a great time chatting up all the fishermen on the ice. Learned enough to give it a try myself. Being a do-it -yourselfer, I ground a point into a metal bar in my garage to make a spud. Cut down an old pole for a jigging stick. I had an old graph that I have used in my canoe. Rigged a board to mount the screen, transducer and lantern batteries in one module. When i tried it out, the graph kept saying the transducer wasn't attached. After much fiddling with cold hands, I got it to recognize the transducer, but it couldn't take any reading. Now, this graph had worked fine for me last time i used it. And it has been inside ever since. Does extreme cold cause transducers to fail? Is that why ice fishing flashers are so expensive? I priced them, and can't see spending $400 for something to go play with panfish for a month out of every year. If I looked around for a used boat graph, what are the odds it will work for me? Pete Collin www.pcforestry.com

I build and fix rods. Do you ever go near Portageville?

I don't get it. Alewives have always been the main diet of steelhead.

I have a large case filled with nothing but books on fishing. They've been accumulating from all the way back to my childhood. Most are somewhere between how-to and storytelling. But there is one title that is so singularly odd that I thought I would talk about it here. "Big Trout!" was published by Ray Johnson in 1980, distributed by the Peton Corporation. Ray was in his early thirties at the time. He chronicles his fishing adventures in Utah's Flaming Gorge Reservoir, offering fishing and camping tips that are specific to that body of water. Nothing too unusual about that. But reading the book makes you become really curious about the man that wrote it. Big Trout! has never been seen by an editor. Or perhaps the editor committed suicide upon skimming the first chapter. Because you have never seen a more disorganized compilation of advice, pieces of stories, blurry photographs, crudely drawn cartoons, and boastful non-sequiturs in your life! The structure and use of punctuation and bold typeface can only be described as "creative". There is absolutely no sense of order to the thing, even from paragraph to paragraph. There will be a tip about trolling speed and direction, followed by a list of his favorite foods, followed by criticisms of the Utah fish and game management, topped off by a description of two thick white hairs that grow from the middle of his eyebrows! Reading Big Trout! can be exhausting, ricocheting your mind in so many directions. By reading the whole thing you can piece together the background of the author: He was a Mormon from somewhere around Salt Lake City whose father died in his arms when the author was 17, in a construction accident. Ray evaded the draft during the Viet Nam war by emigrating to Finland. Upon returning, he was imprisoned for some time. He married three times, the first two wives dying of cancer. (the book is dedicated to a daughter that died in infancy.) It doesn't say what Mr. Johnson's career was, but somehow he managed to camp on the shore of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir for 3 months every winter so he could fish full time for giant brown trout during the most productive months. Every angler's dream. Supposedly he had some kind of professional job the rest of the time. Ray invented his own line of minnow bait, called "Real Minnow Lures". The entire book is peppered with sales pitches to the same, without telling you how you could obtain one. According to Big Trout!, Ray was in many television fishing shows, and has had articles published in all the major sporting publications. At that time and place, the Flaming Gorge Reservoir had a sportfishery that could spawn hardcore anglers like the author. The target fish were brown trout, and they weren't considered big until they topped 20 pounds. In a book filled with numbers, wieght and length statistics, they seemed to top out about 30 pounds. Certainly sizes that would engender some extreme tactics. R.J.'s extreme tactics involved camping through the middle of the winter, breaking skim ice while trolling in the dark while holding the rod in a bare hand, sleeping in caves along the shore, and bathing in freezing water. Many paragraphs are devoted to describing the great physical misery he was willing to go through to catch trophy brown trout. There is no doubt about Ray Johnson's being an accomplished, hardcore fisherman. But he wants you to know this with such vehemence that it leaves you scratching your head. The shameless bragging never stops. We hear all about his superlative exploits, not just at fishing, but at hunting (complete with a list of everything he's ever shot), his mastery of checkers and chess, his grace on the dance floor. Whenever other people are included in his stories, it is usually as a foil to show the author's angling superiority. He sought state record fish, got some, and tells the reader redundantly throughout. The man actually stops, in the middle of his own book, to self-congratulate: From the author about this, his, book: "I've never read a book I enjoyed more- I've reread it, again and again, and chuckle and laugh all the way through, reliving it all over again." Can you imagine! R.J. fancies himself as a renaissance man, being a writer, photographer, artist. Yet I've already described the quality of his prose. And the photos that are actually in focus are usually so poorly lit that you can barely make out the shape of a man or a fish from among the shadows! And the drawings? Why don't I just show an example: In virtually every illustration, each element is labelled in case you can't make out what it is. (Picture the Mona Lisa with "girl" written across M.L.'s chest and "hills" written by the background.) It is strongly hinted by the author that many people do not like him. There are anecdotes involving threatening notes under his wiper blades, antagonistic game wardens, fellow fishermen who try to scare his fish or cut his line. R.J. constantly alludes to rumors about himself involving poaching or illegal fishing methods or guiding without a license, denying it all. During these complaints, there is not a word of self examination as to why he finds himself unpopular to so many. The following excerpt might offer some explanation: While fishing with a paddleboard for macks, I like to throw the board to someone else in the boat, when I hook a fish, to have them help keep me just the right amount of loose copper line coiled in the bottom of the boat...............Unfortunately, those unaccustomed to this practice of mine often think I am merely kidding when I say that I am going to throw the paddleboard to them when I get a bite and hook a fish, and many are not watching or prepared for it, when I suddenly do get a bite and 'throw' the board behind me, to them (expecting them to catch it). "They get hit in the head, in the chest, in the hand, and in the leg," anywhere they are facing me with. It's too bad - it hurts - and I don't mean to do it (but they ought to be watching, hadn't they!). Can you imagine? How long would you put up with that before the trip devolved into feigning a strike every five minutes so you could aim your own paddleboard at his noggin? There is another practice of Ray's that he employs against guests aboard his boat: the "tooth bite". R.J. felt that, while trolling, a rod should be properly held in hand, always ready to rear back when a fish suddenly takes the lure. Should a boatmate's attention flag, should they be caught daydreaming rather than constantly bracing themselves for a fish, Ray would bite off their line, leaving them to return from their reverie to find themselves trailing nothing but monofilament! It might be easy to dismiss Ray Johnson as a churlish, self-deluded crank who self-published his conceited ramblings. The thing is - I would like to meet the guy. For maybe fifteen years of my life, You could describe me as a hard core fisherman. Chasing lake-run fish from the Salmon River to Ohio, married-wing flytying, bamboo rodbuilding, vacations in northern Canada, memorizing latin names of the fly hatches. I know serious fishing and the people who do it. Fishing draws guys of a certain temperament that is tough to describe but unmistakable upon meeting them. A certain staunch individualism. A measure of testiness. Creativity. An intense personality that can both fascinate and grate. Spend enough time on the Oak Orchard, the Salmon River, or in the Catskills, and you will know the type well. These guys have spent more time on the water than you, have way more fishing experience than you ever will. They do not balance fishing with career and family. If you really want to learn as much as you can about fishing, you should meet such people. They may or may not have a guiding license, but they can teach you a great deal. You can accept or reject whatever lessons they give, but their sheer volume of knowledge is undeniable. I would also like to meet Ray Johnson because there can be a big difference between how somebody comes across on the page and how they are in real life. I would like to interview Ray to fill in the blanks of his book. What career allows you to take 3 months off? If you are so unpopular, how did you manage to court and marry 3 women by the time you were 32? How did you deal with your grief and remarry so soon each time? Figuring somebody who purports as much fishing fame as Mr. Johnson ought to have some web presence, I googled him. Turns out some of his weight and line class records still stand. There aren't too many links to be found, considering he predated the internet by decades. But a certain "utahboy37" pops up on Youtube, who turns out to be an aged Ray Johnson still fishing the Flaming Gorge. The number of uploads isn't huge, but a certain eccentricity does come through. Most videos are of lake trout, either gasping in the bottom of a boat or held by somebody at the boat launch. The camcorder is zoomed in extremely close, giving a slow, shaky pan view of each fish from head to tail and back. You wonder if the camera is malfunctioning or something, but if you study the videos you conclude that filling the frame with nothing but flank and scales is exactly what Ray was shooting for. Folks posing with their trophy are asked to state their name, town they're from, and the tour from snout to caudal fin commences. The boasting remains. We are shown freshly caught fish with the RealMinnow lure in its jaw, hear how "They just looove that luuurrreee!". A little girl we may assume is Ray's granddaughter poses with a fish, reciting a memorized pitch for grandpa's innovation. She pauses and catches herself, struggling to make it through her lines without prompting. I looked, but could find no welts from a tossed paddleboard on the child. It seems like R.J.'s talent at videography and salesmanship is right on par with his writing, illustrating, and photography skills. At the time of this writing, Ray's videos have recieved a few dozen hits each, after being up for a few years. How strange for somebody that sees himself right up there with Roland Martin. So you get the feeling that the Peton Corporation was a service for writers who chose to self-publish. Big Trout! had only one edition. The copies are rare enough that they can only be found on Amazon for over $70 apiece! I'm hanging onto my copy, though. it's just about the most unique fishing book in my large collection.

This year I swear to invite people to fish on my boat sooner than 8:30 the night before!

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