Behind the Badge - An Ounce of Prevention
An Ounce of Prevention
District Game Warden James Myhre
An individual can get into trouble with their fish house very easily sometimes. Some years there is good ice early and people haul their fish houses on frozen lakes without having to fight any snow. They may fish in it a few times, then the weather turns cold or we get some bad weather, and the fish house sits empty for a while. Then at some point, we get snow.
There have been countless times when I had to deal with fish houses that were in trouble, but the one that sticks out is an incident on Lake Josephine around 2010. The ice fishing season started out Ok. There was decent access without an abundance of snow, but then it started snowing and didn’t stop.
One guy had a camper that was revamped into a fish house that was hauled onto Lake Josephine early. When the snow hit it was still there, and it stayed there for a long time. About mid-January they quit plowing the couple of miles of gravel that runs from N.D. Highway 36 to Lake Josephine because it kept blowing in with snow.
That winter we received many snowstorms, producing many inches of snow. With all the weight on the ice from the snow, it forced water up through the ice. On many of the lakes, there was snow, then a foot or two of slush and ice. Later in the season it was very difficult to travel on the ice.
I contacted the owner of that fish house on Lake Josephine around the end of February. I told him that I got to his fish house with my tracked ATV and saw that there was a lot of ice over the floor of the fish house. He said that he fished in it earlier that winter and then got busy and hadn’t been back for weeks.
I reminded him that the deadline for getting unattended fish houses off the ice was March 15 and his house would be very difficult to get to without a snowmobile or a tracked machine, not to mention the difficulty in getting the fish house off the ice. He said he would get out there and look at it as soon as he could.
A couple weeks went by, and I saw him out there working on the fish house. There was about 20 inches of ice over the floor of the fish house at that point. He was running a heater in the house in hopes of thawing it out, but it was not working very well. He ran the heater for many days without much luck.
He was able to melt the ice down some and remove some of his equipment inside the fish house. I gave him some extra time after the March 15 deadline came and went. He worked on it for several more days and was to the point of exhaustion.
Eventually, he told me he would gladly take the citation for leaving his fish house unattended on the lake after deadline if he could continue to work on it in until late March or April. I issued him a citation and informed him that it is his responsibility to get the fish house off the lake, no matter how long it takes.
He went back at the beginning of April and there was about 2 feet of ice over the floor of the house. He worked very hard for several days with no luck.
Then as the month of April progressed the ice along the shore started to get bad. When the ice was no longer safe, his fish house was still frozen in place. We talked about what to do next and decided to take off what we could from the fish house and then tie a heavy tow line to it with a buoy and see if we could retrieve it after the ice went out. We drilled and chipped to get to the frame of the camper and then tied on the line.
A few weeks later, I came back and found the buoy. Due to the ice shifting at ice out, the house was carried to an area that was quite a bit deeper than where it originally sat. The house was now closer to a pasture on the north side of the lake, so we decided to drag it to the pasture rather than back to the boat ramp.
I called the rancher and explained the situation, and he gave us permission to try to get the fish house to shore in his pasture. I tied the tow line to my boat and attempted to tow the fish house that was now at the bottom of the lake. After a few seconds the boat started to move and eventually the fish house broke the lake’s surface. It was going well until I got close to shore and it got too shallow for my boat.
We then added to the tow line, wrapped it around a tree on shore and continued to pull with the boat. It worked out great. We got the fish house into about 2-3 feet of water and then pulled on it from shore with a vehicle.
While the fish house stayed upright throughout the towing process, it was destroyed by the moving ice when it sank. All this could have been prevented if he had brought his fish house off the lake the last time he used it.
There was another incident that same year on Cherry Lake where the individual hauled his fish house out on the lake in December, fished in it for a couple hours but then couldn’t come back to it for weeks. By then it was snowed in and he could not get to it. At that point the owner decided to hire a guy with a skid steer to open a trail to his fish house to get it off.
Thankfully, he got it off before the water started to come up through the ice. After the fish house was off, he told me it cost him $500 to hire the guy with the skid steer and he didn’t even catch a fish on Cherry Lake that year.
Just a reminder to remember your fish house!