Hello from Okeechobee with my son

[Richard Flanders]

My neighbor makes excellent pickled pike with fish from this same lake. We fish together there in April. We use frozen herring from Sportsmans Warehouse for bait. I drill two 10" holes, one with a tipup and on the other I use a vintage Garcia Ambassador 5000 casting reel on a stout little ice fishing rod, which works v well for these big pike. Quite sporty actually when they make a long powerful run and the drag is singing away - definitely a Hemingway moment. On a good day I land on the lake and am firing up an hour later to head home with my limit of 5 fish, filleted and skinned and in ziplocs in a cooler. The ravens love the scraps. On one particularly good day last spring I had a fish flopping in the snow, one on the skinning board and one running off with my bait all at once. That was a short day on the ice. No need for two holes on a day like that. On a bad day I can sit there freezing in the wind for 8 hrs and not catch anything, which only happens if it's late and the spawning is over. Sometimes we have a real fishing party with 3-4 planes on this lake.