Brothers make ice fishing look easy

AFTON – If ice fishing were as easy as the Brace brothers make it look, everybody would be doing it, and nobody would care if winter ever ended.

During our visit this week to Twelve Mile Lake in Union County, Richard Brace of Cedar Rapids and Jim Brace of Winthrop drove their vehicles onto the foot-thick ice, unloaded their state-of-the-art electronic fish finders, power augers, heaters and tents and immediately started catching 8.5-inch bluegills.

It was so easy that Dean Baragary of Winthrop and I, the beneficiaries of their skill and experience, could do it, and it was so much fun that we couldn't stop until we'd caught 80 bluegills on Sunday and another 100 on Monday.

I was a little nervous about the trip, knowing that Jim Brace is a true winterophile who thinks arctic outbreaks are uncomfortably warm and that gloves are for wimps.

Reflecting upon my own ice-fishing experience, I pictured us wandering endlessly through wind-driven snow, drilling one unproductive hole after another, struggling to switch jigs in a process that requires numb fingers to tie knots in line invisible to the human eye and, when the stars finally lined up, catching the occasional 5-inch-long bluegill that would yield a potato chip size filet if anyone were desperate enough to clean a fish that small.

There was none of that. We rolled onto the ice at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, bound for an offshore dropoff at which Richard had caught winter panfish in the past. We quickly drilled half a dozen holes that enabled us to pinpoint the dropoff's deep edge, and a half hour later we were all catching thick-backed lunker bluegills in the comfort of heated tents.

Richard and Jim, who are prepared for any contingency and know exactly where in their mounds of equipment to find spare parts and gear, had generously provided Dean and me with their backup Vexilar flasher units, which greatly enhance an ice angler's enjoyment and success.

With colored blips, the sensitive Vexilars display the bottom, the angler's jig and any fish in the water column below the transducer.

Notwithstanding the occasional lull, ours for the most part were lit up like Christmas trees with the red lines indicative of fish closing in upon the green line indicative of our wax-worm-tipped jigs.

After catching a fish, nothing whets an ice angler's anticipation like lowering your green line into a welter of red lines hovering just off the bottom.

While Dean and I kept pinching ourselves, the Brace brothers acted like they had done this before.