Bad Weather, Great Fishing

‘Tis the season. The season for brutally cold, man-killing hunting and fishing, I mean. You’re out on a lake somewhere? Hunting? Fishing? Watch out.

Two nights ago I brought in dog watering buckets, filled dog houses with fresh hay, disconnected watering hoses, filled bird feeders, and checked clothing storage for the location of all my cold weather gear; gloves, hand mufflers, wool socks, insulated coveralls, ear flap caps, et al. I even dug around in the pantry and found two stainless steel thermos bottles, plus another (Glory be. Where’d that come from?) I did not need.

If I were going tiger hunting, you can bet I would clean my rifle five times whether it needed it or not, and made sure I had more bullets than I could possibly ever use unless serving with Custer up on the Little Big Horn. Tigers can kill you.

When Elin goes Tiger hunting, I bet she carries along more three-irons than she could possibly ever use.

You have to know that winter weather is not going to keep me from doing the things I like most, particularly hunting and fishing. I do try to be a lot more careful about how I employ the techniques pursuing same. I have done some incredibly stupid things during winter over the years.

The best flight of ducks over decoys comes at the crack of dawn. In my youth, I commonly launched boats and canoes (canoes more than boats) in the dark into some of the biggest lakes in the state, including Eufaula, in order to catch that crack of dawn flight. It was common, doing that in December and January, to hear ice tinkling off the aluminum hull of a craft going “to sea” in the dark. It was also stupid.

There’s a reason the army drafts 17 year-olds into frontline service, and it’s not all about physique.

As I grew older, I became more cognizant of the fact that there was a later flight of mallards, say about 9:30 or so, as they came back to water for a drink after feeding out into the grain fields, that was just about as good as the crack of dawn flight, and a heck of a lot safer. Once I did become aware of that, in the wisdom of my years I adjusted my arrival time at lakeside to coincide with the full light of day on the water when I could see what was out there that might kill
me.

I have shot, and eaten, many mallards since that mental “dawning.” Here I am writing about it. Wisdom is about the only virtue carried by age, but it’s an important one. Ask Tiger Woods.

Fishing, too? Oh, yeah. Some of the best of the year takes place during the heart of winter, particularly here in the Valley of the Arkansas on Lake Keystone and below Keystone Dam. The two best crappie fishermen I know, Leon Mears of Mannford, and Jack Seawright of Sand Springs will sometimes go days and days and days in the winter without missing a fishing lick over Lake Keystone brush piles. My old friend Jack Test, of Guymon, has for years driven all the way back here from the Panhandle in the coldest weather of February to fish for giant blue cats on Lake Keystone.

Diehard striper fishermen have for years felt that the best time to angle for stripers below Keystone Dam in the Arkansas River is during any full-blown blizzard you can line up with whenever you can catch it coming through the country.

All of that being said, you must be aware of the attendant hazards with winter hunting and fishing. The main one, and almost the only one, is cold water. You just cannot fight it with wet clothes. With a water temperature in the lower 40s or upper 30s, you will die in under 15 minutes if you cannot manage, somehow, to pull yourself out of the water and start moving around, preferably moving around to start a fire which means carrying waterproof matches, right?

If you’ve got a change of dry clothes along with you in your boat or your vehicle (if you can get to it) you’ve at least got a fighting chance to warm your body above the deadly hypothermia level even without a fire or the complete drying off of your body. I have yet to see the boat, or the canoe, that did not have enough room in it for a set of dry clothes rolled tightly and placed in a plastic trash bag.

Many moons ago, if I might coin a phrase, we lost in one duck season 12 hunters; twice, four at a time due to cold water. Four died on Kerr Lake standing (yes, standing) in waist-deep water, and another four on Kaw Lake some distance from the shore. The strange thing about that latter case was that, if memory serves me right, one of the four was found dead high up on dry ground, and away, from the water. A Labrador retriever belonging to the group was also found on dry ground, but also apparently killed by a cold swim.

During the same season, two duck hunters went into the water out of a boat on Lake Oolagah and were missing all night because of darkness and a high wind which hampered the search for them. One body, wearing a lifejacket, was found at daylight of a morning whose temperature at daybreak was similar to that of this past Thursday. The other, incredibly, and I’m not sure what this speaks to, was the other fellow’s buddy, alive, and clinging for all he was worth to a stob in twelve feet of water. So long had he been in that position, and so cold was the night, that his entire upper torso, that which he was able to raise from time to time out of the water, was encased in a foot-thick cocoon of ice in which he was trapped. So far as I know, he is alive today.

How? Why? Who knows? That’s what happened. What you need to understand is that Conrad is not lucky, and, unlike Tiger Woods, is not going to chance any of his late season hunts to chance. ‘ Tis the season, and what would I do if I lost all my endorsements?

© 2009 Conrad M. Vollertsen