Open Water Ice Fishing Over Lake Aeration Systems

The title of this article is a bit misleading in that it would seem to be dealing specifically with safety issues related to open water ice fishing. Not so. There may be food forthought here for anyone who lives in close proximity to any kind of open water in winter. Dugouts, storm water storage ponds, open rivers, aerated lakes, sewage lagoons are all examples of waterbodies that may be open or have thin ice. They don’t have to be aerated either as there are a number of ways that heat can either be created or transferred that can make ice potentially unsafe. We don’t have to go into the reason why you, a normally rational person, might be out on potentially thin ice. They all usually revolve around necessity, recreation or compassion and suffice to say that they all seem like a good idea at the time.

The first time I experienced the power and potential of a lake aeration system on a scale larger than a PFRA dugout was when I supplied the equipment on an emergency basis to keep the fish alive under the ice in Moonshine Lake in Northern Alberta in February of1986. In those days Alberta Provincial Parks operational funding was pro-rated based on the percentage of park occupancy from the previous year. Moonshine Lake Park had enjoyed complete funding the result of the park’s campground being booked nearly solid winter and summer since it was the best readily accessible fishing hole in the West Peace Region for miles around.

The park’s head ranger at the time was a prince of a guy named Ed Whitelock who understood two things really well: 1 – That Moonshine Lake was running out of oxygen and 2 – that if the fish in his lake croaked all the campers were gonna leave and next year he would have no budget. Ed had petitioned Fish and Wildlife to aerate the lake to no avail. Fish and Wildlife pleaded the case that there were no funds available, which was sadly, shamefully, true.

To digress for a moment – if ever there were two provincial departments in any province that should be awash in project money it is Parks and Recreation and Fish and Wildlife or DNR or whatever they’ve been renamed since the last change of government. These people regularly put themselves on the line to try and protect the natural order of things in the wild from acts of greed, avarice or stupidity perpetrated by nearly all of us at one time or another when we slip the confines of civilization and go to the bush. A lot of them would have a hard time telling you why they do the jobs they do but most of the time it has very little to do with either job satisfaction or high wages. The same can be said for anyone involved with running a water treatment plant or with sewage treatmentor garbage collection.

Anyway, Ed told his boss, the Assistant Deputy Minister of Parks and Rec., that, come hell or high water, Moonshine Lake was going to be aerated which was directly usurping the authority of Fish and Wildlife and that they could sort it out at a ministerial level. I told Ed to monitor the dissolved oxygen levels at the bottom sludge/water interface – not in the water above the bottom – and when the dissolved Oxygen level dropped to 2.5parts per million, that I was going to be there the next day with enough aeration equipment to turn the lake over at a rate of around 460 million litres per day and if everybody cooperated we would have it all installed 300 meters off shore under 50+ cm of ice by nightfall.

Fortunately when the day came everybody did cooperate and the system was indeed operational by dusk. It was about this time that I got a bit of a review of my ice melting and lake aeration safety procedures. The Fish and Wildlife technicians were gone, with 240 km to cover before they got home. The Park staff were gone to catch up on chores around the park before supper. I was standing on the ice in the middle of a 150 meter diameter starburst of eight 73 meter long lines of diffuser laying on the bottom in 3.3 meters depth of water. Though there was only 40 cubic feet of air being supplied by oil-less piston compressors, you could feel the energy transfer – conservatively 50 million btu’s of energy per hour for the last few hours. Heat stored in the water, was carried up by the lines of aeration bubbles to the ice over the diffuser lines. Air collected under the ice till it caused the ice to heave and crack with the sound of the burbling release of the trapped air sometimes almost like a breaching Beluga or Pilot whale. The ice was melting easily over an average of 1 inch per hour over the whole is 150 meter diameter area but faster along the fissures and cracks where air was being released to the atmosphere.

I was making the last trip carrying tools off the ice. I was completely at peace with the world after spending a hard day doing what I had signed on for a body to come to this world to do. I had hopefully made some safe fish habitat, cleaned up some water and left the world in a tiny bit better shape in the process. I was just beginning to thank my Creator for the opportunity to prove a point to some important people in a couple of government departments when in my peaceful, exhausted but happy state, I fell through the ice up to my belt buckle. It was sort of an “A-HA!” moment except that my “A-HA!”was inhaled instead of exhaled and my mood must have shifted a bit cause my next bit of conversation with my Creator, though not exactly in tongues was nevertheless –unprintable.

Even though I had periodically dove under ice in the previous sixteen years studying the effects of aeration on ice and was no stranger to the effects of cold water, it’s always a big shock when you’re not expecting it. Although I was in no immediate danger, it was below -10°C and it was over three hundred meters to the truck. I was out of the water faster than an otter after a free fish and squeezing the water out of my pants. Like an otter or a mink I rolled on the snow to help remove more moisture but unlike a mink or otter, I wanted to coat my pants with snow to try and trap remaining heat next to my skin the way a neoprene wetsuit does.

My conversation with my Creator continued after reclaiming my tools as I headed for the truck. “So Jim”, my still small voice started out bemusedly, “you are great for comic relief since the situation isn’t particularly life threatening this time but that has more to do with your incredibly good, dumb luck than your incredibly poor, planning and execution. Maybe you should have discussed the eventuality of thin ice and open water at the safety meeting you didn’t have with the crew before you went out on the ice this morning?”
“Good Dumb Luck, yourself” I muttered through clattering teeth. “We were a little busy trying to make the world a better place and trying to save a few of your precious critters to have a safety meeting. Besides it’s 1986 and safety meetings haven’t been formalized yet.”

“Lose the arrogance Jim, ol’ buddy. As dark as it is and with no flashlight or headlamp you are going to find a hole big enough that you’re going to need your pair of homemade floating ice picks to get yourself out with. Oh yeah, you left them on the seat of the truck beside your flashlight and the nifty whistle you bought just in case.” I said nothing in retort and started to move cautiously.

“Hey! Smarten up or your top half is going to get baptized too. Use the axe with every step to sound the ice the way Lee taught you to find thin ice over beaver runs when he taught you to trap beaver. If it starts to sound like a drum you’ll know even in the dark or under the snow its likely thinner there. Get down and spread your weight out and pull yourself with the blade of the axe held sideways like he showed you on Pinto Creek before you crawled into the beaver house”.

For once I obeyed my still small voice and it was easy to do so because I knew all this stuff. Eleven years earlier I’d spent the winter in the bush with a full blooded Cree named Lee LaGlace. He was intensely proud of his heritage and as my greatest of many mentors, he gifted me with an education that cannot be bought. One of the things he taught me was how to read ice, even in the dark. Though I didn’t, maybe, really need the axe to get off the ice, I did it for the practice and for old time sake. I did it for the first 80 or so meters till I knew I was clear of the aeration system.

This loving caring supreme being that I choose to think of as my Creator was right as usual and my evidence was that I would be right more often too if I listened better. Sometimes this is even harder to do than expecting, then allowing good things to come to yourself.

I picked up the pace to a steady dog trot exerting enough effort to burn a few extra calories but not enough to get the top half of me damp with perspiration. With about 50 meters to go I asked my still small voice, “Any thoughts on how to get these frozen jeans and long-johns off?” The response was a zinger as only comes from a real master of zingers. Someone, for example, like my eldest daughter Kelly: “Easy. Think back on who you worked for in the last election your worked in Saskatchewan and what they really stood for. You’ll feel so small your pants will fall right off.” I had to coax the fly abit with a blowtorch, but it worked.

There is a happy epilogue to this story. I phoned Ed Whitelock the next day and suggested he get a bale of plastic baling twine, a few lath for stakes and some fluorescent survey tape and surround the starburst of the eight diffuser lines with a simple barrier. I believe he printed a leaflet explaining to fishermen and campers what was going on and for them to keep track of their pets if they were out on the ice. Everyone respected the buffer zone.

I was able to get back over there from Beaverlodge about a month later in March. The lake’s oxygen content had stabilized at 5.5 ppm top to bottom, side to side, end to end and the fish were doing fine. There was an eight sided star shaped area of open water about 3 acres in size. A Chinook had blown in a couple of days previously so the star’s points were much longer and irregular on the windward East end of things.

I had come back prepared because I intended to fish the open water with a fly rod. I had my homemade floating ice picks, a floater jacket with a whistle and a flashlight attached, mostly cotton sweats with an elastic waistband so a close encounter with thoughts of poor politics and a blowtorch wouldn’t be required if I got wet. I had an eight pound splitting maul to test and modify the edge of the ice to my liking and most important of all, I wasn’t alone.

I walked out towards the open water. Other people had augered ice fishing holes around the edges so there were plenty of indicators for ice thickness. Once I was beyond the ice fishing holes I jumped up and down as I walked out till I could see ripples in the water along the edge of the ice from my jumping. At this point I was about two meters from the edge of the ice so I knelt down and started to break out a half moon shaped piece of ice that was 10-12 cm thick. Rather than push the small sheet of ice away I dug into it with the point of the splitting maul and pulling it back towards me, I shoved it under the ice I was kneeling on. I tried the exercise again but the ice was far enough back from the aeration that it was too thick to break and with the piece I’d just broken off under it, quite safe to stand on as long as I was standing alone. There are lots of variations to the theme of spreading your weight over a larger area to operate safely around open water in winter – everything from a few planks, to snowmobile toboggans, to those somewhat heavy but very durable plastic boats from Canadian Tire. They’re not cheap but they do slide on ice and snow very well, can carry heaps of gear and are quite stable. The boat’s cost is a lot easier to justify as well if you are using it for more than just the summer.

Looking back on it the only thing I would do differently now is take along a one or two litre plastic pop bottle with a 50-100 ft length of plastic baling twine as a homemade lifesaver. Fill the bottle with enough water that you can toss it a good distance like a lanyard line but leave enough air in it so that it floats. It’s not going to be a lot of good for you to get yourself out with, but it’s there for your buddy to throw to you.

Once I was satisfied that the edge of the open water was safe I rigged a leech pattern on a floating line with a piece of leader about the length of the rod. I set to the serious business of flipping the fly with the assistance of the light breeze, along the edges of the open water. It was just swell! Here it was March and I was fly fishing on an open lake in Northern Alberta! Working with the puffs of breeze with a fan of left handed S-casts with nothing to hook up on the back cast, the cast lengths were just stupid!

The fish agreed. Most stayed for another day and one came home for supper. As is my custom I filleted it boneless with the skin completely off to eliminate any residual geosmine. The fish was served up with homegrown spuds, a simple garden salad and a glass of cheap Chablis while I reflected on the psychology of how fishing on open water in winter somehow makes the winter shorter. I found out years later that there actually is some solid science for this! I have fished open water on lakes in winter ever since and I’ll bet my winters have been shorter than yours.

Take care and hopefully we’ll see you out on the ice sometime!