Ice Fishing Update
By Tim Moore
Contributing Writer
Man, what a winter this has been. If you like outdoors winter activities, you must be as frustrated and bewildered as I am. First, it’s winter, then it’s spring, then winter is back. Wait, now it’s spring again? Okay, here’s winter. Nope, never mind, it’s going to be mid-40s and raining. For me, if we get more than one warm stretch during the ice fishing season, most everyone outside the lakes region thinks and hears that the ice isn’t safe and bookings for ice fishing trips drop off. Turn on the news or check in with local departments and you’ll hear people saying that the ice isn’t safe. The truth is, there’s no such thing as safe ice, but we have plenty for fishing right now.
Businesses, such as mine, that depend on cold winters are scrambling to make as much money as they can in case winter decides to go kaput. It’s been a very unpredictable winter and it’s anybody’s guess how it will go from here on out. The last two weeks of March are the best weeks of the winter for ice fishing. The fishing goes from good to unbelievable, and the weather is usually amazing to go with it. Losing the ice early would be a blow to those who are already planning their late-March ice fishing trips with us.
Generally, once we get past the month of February, the days of making ice are over. Longer days with more intense sunlight generally mean that we are in a holding pattern until warmer weather arrives and the ice begins to decay. You never know though. I’ve seen years where the impossible happened, and we made ice in March. I remember traveling for business in March of 2018. While I was gone for six days, we made five inches of ice. Man, I’d love it if that happened this year.
While the last ice reports I received from areas outside where I guide, which were over a week ago, said that the broads on Winnipesaukee were frozen but not safe for snowmobile or ATV travel, the bays are all sporting ice measured in double digits. From what I am hearing, most of the bays on the lake are supporting machine (ATV or snowmobile) travel. Some bays even have plowed roads with vehicle travel. Other bays are only supporting snowmobiles and ATVs. I doubt that it is safe to travel from one bay to another, as in most years, I do know that there is plenty of fishable ice to be found if you’re careful.
The areas that I guide ice fishing trips on are sporting 13” – 16” of good solid ice. I don’t give specific ice thickness reports for specific areas on years like this, because I want people to check for themselves. I would hate to say that area “a” has x-inches of ice, only to have someone misunderstand exactly where area “a” is and venture onto unsafe places. We’re definitely having an unseasonably warm winter, but through it all we have been steadily making ice. Every five to seven days or so I recheck ice thicknesses and to my amazement, it just keeps getting thicker and while it’s not as thick as I’d like to see, I’ll take steady growth for as long as Mother Nature will give it to us. We won’t finish the ice fishing season on March 31 with over 20-inches of ice across most of the lake like we did last year, but every day it looks more and more like we will be able to finish out the season somewhere on the lake…at least for now.
Tim Moore is a full-time professional fishing guide in New Hampshire. He owns and operates Tim Moore Outdoors, LLC. He is a member of the New England Outdoors Writers Association and the producer of Tim Moore Outdoors TV. Visit www.TimMooreOutdoors.com for more information.
