Move your hand to your groin area and trace your inner thigh to where your leg becomes torso. You’ll feel a cord-like muscle there that seems to attach your upper and lower regions together. Online medical texts were more baffling than helpful in determining the specific name of this body part, but ask any ice fisherman and they’ll know it as the “ice-fishing muscle.”
Spend a day running for tip-ups (also known as “jacks” in some places), and the ice-fishing muscle will reveal itself to you by throbbing steadily. With the soreness comes realization that, with the exception of the occasional bathtub mishap, our legs are unaccustomed to struggling for purchase on gripless surfaces. This muscle, then, must be the last line of defense in such an instance – the difference between a vertical and a horizontal pose.
We’ve been using our ice-fishing muscles a lot during this largely snowless winter. The ice was about 12 inches thick as of last weekend where I fish, and while we did get snow recently, for the most part we’ve been chasing flags by dashing headlong across mixed-media surfaces. You get a good head of steam on the snowy part of the lake, then hit a 20-foot run of sheer ice, then more snow, then more ice, you get the idea.
In theory, we’d be exercising our ice-fishing muscles less if we walked or jogged to the flags instead of sprinting, but when you fish with your younger brother this is impossible. As anyone with siblings can attest, you intellectually outgrow your adolescent competitive streak but the muscle memory is always there. In church, for instance, you might still find yourself subconsciously opting for a crushing handshake at the peace-be-with-you part without even meaning to. It’s sort of the same thing on the ice, where a dash to a flag is always taken at full speed and may include a hip check or stray elbow for old-time’s sake; even if once you get to the flag you take turns pulling in the fish and resume acting like people in their mid-30s.
The fishing has been good this winter and only promises to get better. We fish a lake full of perch, chain pickerel, and largemouth bass. We relish the bass for their fight and, as the law dictates, we let them all go. The perch we catch are a disappointment in a sporting sense but the big ones serve as a fine gastronomical conciliation prize. We filet the keepers right on the ice and fry the sweet meat over a camp fire. Dredged in basic seasoning, the filets curl against the cast iron pan then settle before flaking apart beneath your fork.
In all my years of fishing I’ve yet to come up with a use for the occasional gill-snagged pickerel we keep. Rumors abound that they can be eaten but in all my attempts they just tease me. I’ve thrown my whole culinary repertoire at them, but no matter how they’re cooked, I’m always left with a delicious smelling, lusciously textured slab of meat that proves too bony to eat. It’s like biting into a pin cushion.
If any of you fishermen or women out there have a pickerel-cooking trick up your sleeve, by all means share.
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