Winter’s icy grip authors final ice-fishing tale of season

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This article was published 29/03/2022 (1259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jordan Manton had no idea about the kind of ordeal he’d be in for when he tried to remove his permanent ice-fishing shack from its Lester Beach spot last Friday afternoon.

“When we got there, it was frozen up past the bottom of the door,” the 32-year-old ice-fishing enthusiast and owner of Crunch Time Tackle, told the Free Press Tuesday. “Water had gotten into the shack, the shack was flooded, it had about three inches of water with the layer of ice on top of it inside.”

Manton realized he was done for the day and would have to return; he spent most of his Saturday working — successfully — with a friend to break the shack free. They returned Sunday to load it up in a truck and get in home, and…

It was frozen in place again.

After a bit of extra labour, the weekend of woe finally came to the hoped-for ending.

“I had already seen pictures of similar circumstances other people were in on the lake, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so bad… I was wrong,” Manton said. “Obviously, all the warm weather we had caused everything to melt.”

Despite the looming March 31 deadline to remove shacks from bodies of water north of Highway 16, and ice-fishing season set to end Monday, there are plenty of shelters frozen in place.

Although there’s still a heavy layer of ice atop the water on many Manitoba lakes and rivers, recent roller-coaster temperatures, combined with extreme winter snowfall, created difficult, frozen-slush conditions on the water making shelter removal difficult, and near-impossible for vehicles to get anywhere close to them.

Anyone who leaves a shack on the ice past the deadline risks getting a $152 fine, along with being charged the cost of removing the shelter, a spokesperson from the province said.

“Officers work with clients on a case-to-case basis if a member of the public contacts the department experiencing difficulty removing their ice-fishing shack,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Manitoba Conservation has seen a “typical” number of people in this situation, but Manton said he’d never before seen his shack freeze the way it did in all his years of owning it.

“It’s the first time it’s been this bad,” he said. “Usually it’s a little bit frozen, and we’re prepared for that when we get there.… We weren’t really thinking it was going to be this bad.”

Todd Longley, a guide who takes ice-fishers out on Lake Winnipeg in Gimli, had to cancel plans after he tore tendons in his foot while attempting a test Friday to determine whether he’d be able to drive on the ice with his track vehicle.

“There’s over (a metre) of ice still on the lake, everywhere, it’s just all the surface water on the ice. And then at nighttime, it freezes up,” Longley said. “So there’s a lot of people that are stuck out there that can’t get their shacks off the ice right now.”

While owners of shelters in the Northwest, North Central and Northeast Conservation divisions have until April 15 to remove them, the deadline on the Red River has already passed.

Longley suspects some fishers will leave them there for Conservation to eventually take down.

“Some people waited to the last minute and they should be aware of ice conditions. If I owned a shack, I would have had it off well over a week ago. Waiting to the last minute like this causes a lot of problems, like freezing in, and because we had so much snow this winter, there’s a lot of snow that needs to melt, so you’ve got a lot of surface water that’s on top of the ice,” he said.

“It needs to go somewhere, and it just melts and sits there. It’s not good, it’s not good at all.”

While some fishers have taken to less-permanent tent options and expensive, hard-to-find RV fishing houses, Longley said he doubted this weather would push people to abandon their permanent shelter setups.

“They’re part of our way of life out here with ice fishing on the lake and on the rivers,” he said. “People go out on the weekends with their families, they have their own little shack set up the way they like it.… It’s just a way to spend time in the winter in Manitoba.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca