The odd winter weather has made for terrific outdoor ice skating on the local ponds and lakes. Last weekend my daughter April and son-in-law Corey chose to skate on Wickett Pond in Wendell, but I couldn’t resist returning to skate on the Connecticut River in Hinsdale, N.H.
Not the river itself, not even Houdini would do that, but on what residents refer to as the “setback” above the 108-year-old Vernon dam. The reservoir is separated into three parts by a rail trail and an access path to a pair of high tension towers.
I walked along the path and planted my butt on a frozen mudbank near a beaver dam. After enough effort, I was able to get my feet into the 30-year-old Bauer Supremes and then stand, wobble and push off over the glistening ice.
Self-propelled motion provides a meditative sense of well being. Cyclists know it and so do surfers, hang gliders, canoeists and kayakers. I was the only ice skater. Everyone else was ice fishing, but there was room for everyone. Each time I went further out until I caught a glint of something small and white on the ice. It was a golf ball that had been hit from shore. I picked it up and flung it back toward a group standing around a fire across from the closed nuke plant.
A solitary gull swooped over the reeds and cattails and pecked at a frozen perch that a fisherman had left on the ice.
Back near the shoreline one of the locals yelled, “Stay away from the trestle.” He pointed to the open water that was flowing through a culvert on what’s now the Fort Hill Rail Trail. One of his buddies had put a shanty on the path and they were there to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and hang out. I asked one of them to get my iPhone from the car and told him the door was unlocked.
He returned in a few minutes, tossed me the device and mentioned my Massachusetts license plates. “I worked construction with some guys down there and they needed a permit for everything,” he said. “We like it up here. We don’t need a mother and father to tell us what to do.”
That’s life in the live free or die state. “Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Granite State poet Robert Frost in 1914.
Frost lived in an era when intrepid ice fishermen used hand-held drills to bore through the ice. Nowadays, they hitch sleds to ATVs and haul augers, tip-ups and tackle to wherever they choose to drop lines.
The Connecticut River Watershed Council says New England’s largest river flows 410 miles from its source, a tiny beaver pond near the Canadian border. Some monster fish have been taken from its waters, including a 12-pound catfish and 41-pound carp that were caught in Hinsdale. Both were summer catches and both are state records, but in winter, people go after a 25-fish limit of perch and bluegill called panfish because they’re small enough to fit in a fry pan.
Jason Wells of Vernon, Vermont, had put his shanty about 100 yards from shore and was fishing with his son Tanner. “We’ve got a pike and two pickerels, nothing big yet,” he said. “Gotta get the kids outside.”
His shanty was square-shaped and large enough to hold two or three people. It had a window to check on the tip-ups and a shelf to hold salt and pepper. “If one of us gets a deer, we’ll bring the meat down and cook it on the grill,” said his friend Jeremiah. “We’ll either cook it outside or open the door to let it vent.”
Wells looked over my shoulder, turned and yelled, “Devin that yours? Flag’s up!”
Devin Hazelton ambled over to where a spring-loaded flag on his tip-up had signalled a strike. He leaned over the hole, tapped out a thin film of ice and grabbed the spool from the bottom of the tip-up. “Yeah there’s something,” he said as he reeled in the line. “It’s tugging now.”
A foot-long pickerel had taken the bait, a two-inch pond shiner. “Going for the big ones,” he said, referring to northern pike.
Hazelton gently pulled the pickerel through hole, unhooked it and guided it back through the eight inches of ice and into the water. It thrashed twice and disappeared. “We got a 30- and 32-inch pike today and a few years ago I got a 40-inch.” The longest on state record is 44.5-inches, taken four years ago on Moose Reservoir in Dalton.
“I came down and watched people (ice fish) for three years, and I’ve been doing it myself for 15 years,” said Hazelton, who lives in Hinsdale and works with his father Rodney who owns Putney Saw Works. They travel throughout New England sharpening the big blades used by lumber companies.
The ice cracked and the water made a deep reverberating sound that echoed across the setback. “Somebody’s letting the water out of the dam, that’s what all the cracking and banging’s about.”
It was scary to some, perhaps the group that was trying to hook up a propane tank to their catalogue-purchased ice shelter. “They got ice fishing clothes on and everything and they’re out about ten feet,” laughed Hazelton.
I returned on Sunday when two game wardens showed up and checked peoples’ fishing licenses. They were dressed head-to-toe in brown, with gold badges and holstered guns. “Catch many people?” I asked.
“Get a day with 30 people, maybe one forgot to pay $35 for a license,” said the warden. “You got a rig out there?”
“Nope just skating,” I said.
He nodded and walked back to shore.
I watched them trudge up the access road and back to their vehicle. “They come here often?” I asked Hazelton.
“Nope, but they’re gonna be out here a lot more. Last year they caught some guys catching panfish way over the limit, like around 300. They were selling ‘em to the Chinese places.”
The temperature had edged above freezing and the ice was getting soft. Mother nature is fickle and outdoor skating is usually ruined by early season snow. This winter, the warm-and-cold pattern has let pond ice melt and re-freeze into smooth sheets of ice.
It’s changed my attitude. As Devin Hazelton said, “I never liked the cold, but now I love it.”