Ice fishing season around the corner

Before heading out on any ice, it is always best to contact local sport shops to ask about ice conditions on the lake or river you want to fish.

But the ice is coming, and in the meantime, it’s the perfect time for anglers to take the first step that avid ice angler and DNR fish supervisor Terry Margenau says is one key to great ice fishing.

“Tool up,” he says. “Some ice anglers may be like me and stash the tip-ups and jigs poles after the last outing in February or March without a thought until first ice the following December. Then suddenly, you find yourself ready to go and surprise, after sitting around all summer some grease has dripped out of the tip-ups, the lines are in a snarl, leaders need replacement, and hooks are a little rusty. Similar to any trip, fishing or otherwise, it’s a great asset if you can take a little time BEFORE that first trip to get organized.”

He’s learned a few things over his long fishing career – he ice fishes 20 to 40 days a winter – he’s also gained insights working since 1983 as first a DNR fisheries researcher, and now a fisheries supervisor.

Here are Margenau’s four other top tips to assure tip-ups during early ice:

* Creepers. Don’t leave home without them. Early season ice can be smooth and slick, especially with a dusting of powder snow on top. These metal cleats and traction devices attached to boots help avoid slips and falls. Not sure about everyone else, but I don’t bounce quite as well as I used to.
* Travel light and be mobile. One of the nice things about early season ice is that the ice isn’t that thick yet. No need to drag that power auger along until at least 6 inches of ice has formed. A hand auger or ice spud can carve out a nice hole in a minute. Because you can open a hole much quicker than during late season, you can have more freedom to move around into different areas to find fish.
* Think shallow. Inland predators like walleye are often found in shallow water during the early season. Why? That’s where the food is. Learn more about fish biology and feeding habits during winter the article Life Under the Ice in the December 2009 issue of Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine.
* Split the difference. Many anglers, when setting tip-ups, place their bait a certain distance off the bottom. For example, say water depth is 12 feet. Find bottom and set your bait one or two feet off bottom. If you are fishing in vegetation, my general rule is to think in halves. Twelve feet of water –put your bait at six feet. This serves two purposes. First, vegetation is still occupying a fair portion of the water column at early ice. If you place your bait too close to the bottom, there is a good chance it’s in the vegetation. No sight – no bite. Second, predators like northern pike cruise the water column. Even if they are near the bottom they can find prey above them. The opposite is less likely to be true.

5 Favorite Ice Fishing Facts

* Wisconsin has 1.4 million licensed anglers, and about one-third that number report they ice fish.
* Ice fishing trails only sledding, snowmobiling and ice skating outdoors as the most popular of outdoor winter activities.
* Ice anglers catch 14 million fish during the ice fishing season.
* Nearly half of all fish caught during ice fishing season are kept, compared to about one-third during the open water season.
* Panfish, northern pike and walleye, are the top species caught, in order, with 11.7 million, 866,000, and 750,000, respectively.

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A bevy of bright stars

A bevy of bright stars congregates in the east this evening. Sirius, the brightest star in the night, is lowest in the sky. Blue-white Rigel and orange Betelgeuse, the leading lights of Orion, are above it, with the twins of Gemini far to their left.

- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill

Whose pot pipe? Not my pot pipe! Where's the pot?

Now that there is some funny sh!t:

About a month ago....two 14-year old Mauston boys had allegedly stolen a car which had been recovered near Wausau. Over the weekend....the same two-boys were involved in a curfew violation. Further investigation revealed the two-boys had entered an unlocked vehicle in an alley behind the 400-block of North Union Street in the City of Mauston and allegedly took a digital camera, some papers from a purse, a pot pipe, and marijuana. The camera and pipe were recovered. The owner denied the marijuana and pot pipe were hers. The two Mauston boys were referred to the Juneau County Department of Human Services for theft, attempted theft, and obstructing and one of the boys was also charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. The marijuana was never recovered.

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STRANGE LIGHTS OVER NORWAY

On the morning of 12/9 in Norway, people saw a strange and still-unexplained phenomenon. Eye-witness Nick Banbury of Harstad reports: "We are used to seeing lots of auroras here in Arctic Norway, but on my way to work this morning I saw something completely unexpected. Between 7:50 and 8:00 a.m. local time, there was a strange light in the sky," shown here in a photo taken by Jan Petter:

"It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in colour to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end," continues Banbury. "This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to the earth. According to the press, this could be seen all over northern norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart."

"[A popular] suggestion at the moment is that it was a rocket shot up by a Russian submarine in the white sea, but the Russians deny this apparently. A big mystery indeed!"

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Got A Fix For My Firewood Addiction, And It Was Good!

The target.


On the ground and all cut up.


A little wet and cold, but I ain't no momma's boy. Makes the fire at home feel all the better.


Gotta love that old maul! Three swings makes four splits nearly every time.


All split up.


It warmed up to 30°F during the night and this morning the snow had solidified somewhat. I was able to pack the trail pretty good, but was still leery of pulling my wood trailer. It occurred to me that an old snowmobile cutter from about 1970 was propped up somewhere in the junkpile. I found it, dragged it out through the snow, and hooked it up! Worked surprisingly well. In fact, it worked so well that even though my initial intention was not to haul any wood in it but just my equipment, I ended up hauling wood with it anyway. I took it a little easy on it, because the old fiberglass is kind of brittle, and I did forget a couple times and through some splits in it pretty hard, but it survived. It's pretty beat up anyway, from many years of teenagers a long time ago.


I think the poor old thing deserves a place next to my woodhauler. At least for now.


- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill

Read the story before looking at the picture below!

Well, there is good news and bad news about my Christmas decorations this year

Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after 2 days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever. Great stories. But two things made me take it down. First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by. Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder and almost killed herself putting it against my house; she didn't realize it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn't take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard.

Kind of feel like I gave in to 'the man' by taking him down but my neighbor did confirm to near miss accidents on the busy street next to my house. I think I made him too real this time...

So it was fun while it lasted!



















Thanks Matt!

- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill

There's too much snow!

I was able to get out into the woods, and back, but just barely. All the way was only moving at a snail's pace. I even melted a little plastic near the muffler on my ATV from working her kind of hard. There's no way I will be able to pull my wood trailer, even empty. I might be able to cut some wood, but not haul it up. I'll have more piled out there. The third year in a row that this has happened, too much snow right away in the beginning of December and then I can't cut any wood. And one thing about this area is that after it snows, it gets quite cold and then the snow won't pack/settle. It turns to a sugar-like texture that just slithers around under your wheels. Great for snowmobiling, bad for my wood cuttin' addiction.

Not exactly stuck, more of a controlled creeping.


The deer have been hittin' the turnip patch pretty hard. Can't tell from this picture, but they've got the far end dug down to the dirt. Should have planted turnips on the trails and maybe the deer would have plowed the snow off!


Skidplate dragging and wheels spinning all the way.


The thing about raspberries and hazelnuts is that in the summer the thick leaves and brush hide the available wood on the ground. Then in the winter the snow sticks to the brush and it still hides the wood!


This tree was going to be my next firewood target. I can get to it, kind of, and I can see it above the snow-cover,so maybe soon.


Nothing special about this picture, I just thought it was pretty. A future generation of white pine covered in snow.


- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill

The 2009 Geminid Meteor Shower

Make hot cocoa. Bundle up. Tell your friends. The best meteor shower of 2009 is about to fall over North America on a long, cold December night.

"It's the Geminid meteor shower," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "and it will peak on Dec. 13th and 14th under ideal viewing conditions."

A new Moon will keep skies dark for a display that Cooke and others say could top 140 meteors per hour. According to the International Meteor Organization, maximum activity should occur around 12:10 a.m. EST (0510 UT) on Dec. 14th. The peak is broad, however, and the night sky will be rich with Geminids for many hours and perhaps even days around the maximum.

Cooke offers this advice: "Watch the sky during the hours around local midnight. For North Americans, this means Sunday night to Monday morning."

Researchers are interested to see what the Geminids do in 2009. The shower has been intensifying in recent decades and they wonder if the trend will continue.

Geminids are pieces of debris from a strange object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet. It is, basically, the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini: sky map.

When the Geminids first appeared in the late 19th century, shortly before the US Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display.

But now it has. "The Geminids are strong—and getting stronger," says Cooke.

What's going on? Jupiter's gravity has been acting on Phaethon's debris stream, causing it to shift more and more toward Earth's orbit. Each December brings a deeper plunge into the debris stream.

Meteor expert Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO) says the trend could continue for some time to come. "Based on modeling of the debris done by Jim Jones in the UWO meteor group back in the 1980s, it is likely that Geminid activity will increase for the next few decades, perhaps getting 20% to 50% higher than current rates."

A 50% increase would boost the Geminids to 200 or more meteors per hour, year in and year out. "That would be an amazing annual display," says Cooke.

Moreover, says Brown, "the proportion of large, bright Geminids should also increase in the next few decades, according to Jones' model." So the Geminids could turn into a "fireball shower."

Brown cautions that "other models of the debris stream come to different conclusions, in some cases suggesting that Geminids will decrease in intensity in the coming decades. We understand little about the details of the formation and evolution of Phaethon's debris despite many years of efforts."

Recent trends favor a good show. Enjoy the Geminids!

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China: Secret Pilot UFO file released

A detailed UFO report of an incident involving a commercial pilot that includes radar images and recordings of the conversation between the pilot and the airport tower has just been made public in China. The report was released at a scientific forum held in Shanghai.
The event occurred on March 18 in the morning in Shanghai. Later that day hundreds of readers rang a local newspaper ‘The Xinmin Evening Times’ to report a strange object they had seen in the sky. One of these callers was the Tower Manager at Hongqiao Airport, Mr Jin Xin. He mentioned that a UFO had been spotted by tower staff and picked up by radar and that he had the recording.
Mr Jin Xin added that he requested that a pilot due to take off at exactly the same time chase the object and the pilot, who agreed, had reported that the UFO, seemingly made of two parts, was circling around his plane. A transcript of the conversation between the pilot and tower control has also been preserved.
The pilot witnessed the UFO for no less than 9 minutes and described the UFO in the conversation with the tower as initially a glowing fireball displaying extraordinary flight characteristics and quickly shifting position before ‘Descending sharply, changing colour from red to black and then separating into two objects: The top one a sphere, the bottom a rectangle. The craft travelled in a Northeast direction at level flight before climbing and disappearing.’
The pilot, Mr Zhu Zhaoyuan , was highly experienced at the time and was flying for Jinan Airlines. The aircraft he was flying was small commercial plane.
A number of UFO research societies were asked to investigate this event as well as scientists. Professor Wang Sichuao of Nanjing’s Purple Mountain Observatory (Of the July Eclipse UFO fame) thinks that this was an extraterrestrial encounter while the custodian of the recording, Mr Jialu Wu, an ex-engineer at the Shanghai Aircraft Design and Research Institute and now director of the Shanghai UFO research centre believes the UFO was in fact two airplanes misidentified by the pilot.

In the process of releasing this astonishing file, a researcher from the Purple Mountain Observatory, Mr Liu Yan, revealed that the institution had investigated many thousands of UFO reports received from the public. According to Mr Yan, 90 percent of such sightings are eventually identified.

Chinese Ufologists have observed that this figure still leaves a lot of genuine UFOs that have been seen above China.


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After The Storm

On the radio they were calling it the "Storm of the Decade" and saying the old timers couldn't remember a worse one. I say bologna! We've had much worse storms than this, even as recently as last year and the year before. We only got a foot of snow. We've gotten way more than that in a single storm before. The wind has blown harder. The drifts have been bigger. And the temperature has been way colder. I think the old timers are suffering from memory loss.

It's supposed to warm up a little this weekend and maybe I can start packing some of the trails in the woods. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Snowflakes!


The woodstack that I'm currently burning from.


The plow truck going by, again.


And right behind the plow truck is the pulp truck. The loggers have a little bit bigger equipment than I do so they can still work in the woods!


I'm sure everybody recognizes this, you've seen it pictured hundreds of times, my wood hauling trailer. Looks pretty sad right now, sitting there doing nothing.


The beginning of the trail into the woods, and at this time also the end. Snoopy is pointing at it, as if shaking a finger to scold it, but the white obstacle still won't go away.


Some of my overflow woodstacks.


And a few more stacks of excess firewood.


And a very depressed-looking balsam fir.


- Quads, hailing from Grand Marsh Observatory atop Elk Castle Hill