You go to the bait store for minnows, hit the lake and drive on a plowed road, unload your gear and walk into a fish house with holes drilled and the heat on.

This scenario plays out on a daily basis across the state during the winter as fishing enthusiasts utilize services provided by resorts, outfitters, and bait suppliers.

But there’s a lot of work that goes into making your winter fishing experience possible long before you hit the ice. Those minnows just don’t show up in a tank, roads don’t plow themselves, and fish houses aren’t magically built and placed on the ice.

If you’re in the business of catering to winter fishermen there is no down time. Once the open water season starts to wind down preparation for the winter months begins.

Brian LaBore owns Lakeroad Lodge Motel on the south shore of Lake of the Woods, one of the state’s premier ice fishing destinations. Like most resort owners on the lake, LaBore has been busy in recent weeks preparing for the winter fishing season.

There are rooms to get cleaned, fish houses to repair and paint, and maintenance to complete on trucks for plowing roads and pulling those houses across the ice among other chores.

LaBore says the winter provides a good chunk of annual income for resorts at Lake of the Woods so there’s a lot of work that goes into preparing for the season and it all has to be done before that first angler of the ice fishing season arrives.

“A lot of people don’t realize what it takes to prepare for the ice fishing season – the time and costs it involves before anyone gets here,” LaBore said. “But that’s where we make our money so all of us bust our butts to make sure we’re ready.”

The upkeep to his fleet of fish houses alone takes countless hours. LaBore said that he’s very meticulous with his houses and makes sure they have a fresh coat of paint, cleaned inside and out, and are in working order before they get put to use on the lake.

Keep in mind that winter is a long season at Lake of the Woods. Since it borders Canada, walleye fishing is allowed through mid-April so that’s nearly five months of wear and tear on the houses as they’re moved from spot to spot across miles of frozen lake.

The thick skids under the fish houses, which allow them to be pulled easier, often have to be replaced by the start of a new season. There’s just no way of avoiding some type of maintenance on most of his fish houses from the previous year.

“The skids really get tore up and the houses get beat up because we drag them around all winter,” LaBore said. “You can’t do anything about it, except fix them before the new season starts.”

The same is true on his trucks and plows used to move the houses and keep roads open during the winter season. LaBore said work on them starts in the fall and continues all season due to the abuse they’re put through on a daily basis.

“It seems like there’s always work to be done on a truck,” he added. “That doesn’t end until the ice fishing season does.”

With the fish houses ready to go, LaBore has spent a lot of his time this week checking ice conditions. Before he allows anyone to hit the ice he makes sure it’s thick enough for travel.

That involves years of experience on what is sometimes questionable ice early in the season. But with fishermen wanting to come up this week, he wants to make sure the ice will support them.

If he doesn’t feel it’s safe, LaBore won’t let people use his roads. It’s a job he takes seriously. At this time of the year, it’s one of his most important and time consuming tasks as well.

“We check ice depths every day early in the season — we have to so nobody breaks through — it has to be done daily,” he said. “We typically stake the first road onto the lake and we have a bunch of guys that want to get on the ice but before they do we have to know it’s safe.”

At Mille Lacs Lake, resort owners such as Terry Thurmer of Terry’s Boat Harbor on the west side of the lake, begin preparing for the ice fishing season as soon as he pulls his launches and boats at the end of October.

With approximately 20 fish houses and five plow trucks to get ready, there isn’t much down time between early November and when his first house gets put on the lake. During a good year, when ice conditions allow, that’s usually around Christmas at Mille Lacs.

But Thurmer likes to have his equipment in working condition weeks before he uses it. He doesn’t want to deal with getting his fish houses and trucks fixed when people want to start fishing.

“You have to be ready to go as soon as the ice allows,” Thurmer said. “We start checking everything for the winter as soon as we can in the fall and there’s always something to do.”

But the work doesn’t end when people actually start showing up to fish. For Thurmer, the work intensifies as the season progresses, snow piles up and roads need to be maintained.

He estimates plowing about 40 miles of roads to the various hot spots throughout the lake and it’s not a one-time deal. Every time it snows or blows those roads have to be reopened.

The reason for having five trucks is simple — he says at some point one of them breaks down and you can’t stop plowing as a result. He has to keep as many of his trucks in operating order as possible throughout the winter.

That’s not cheap with gas prices as they are these days. He says that at best his trucks get two miles per gallon and it doesn’t take long to blow through 100 gallons of gas.

He also wants people to understand that’s why most resorts, including his, charge a small fee to use the roads they plow. Without that access fee, there wouldn’t be roads on most lakes, especially the bigger bodies of water such as Mille Lacs.

“Some people might not understand the cost involved in keeping those roads open,” he said. “If we didn’t charge people to use the roads I couldn’t afford to plow and I think most people know that and appreciate it.”

He says he doesn’t hear many complaints from people about paying the fee, usually between $8 or $10 depending on the resort and lake. In years with a lot of snow, utilizing those plowed roads might be the only option for getting on the lake.

In recent years, more and more anglers have purchased wheel-styled fish houses that they pull onto the lake. Many of them are big and would be impossible to get on a lake the size of Mille Lacs if resorts wouldn’t maintain a road system.

“It’s changed with the rental houses over the past 10 years because it seems like everyone has a wheel house now,” Thurmer said. “We have a lot more people using our roads with their own equipment rather than renting a house from us.”

http://www.sctimes.com/article/20111204/SPORTS05/112040056/Fishing-More-ice-than-cold

Ice Fishing Lake Manitoba Narrows