Sturgeon, Recollected: Day 4

I didn’t think much of it when I drove out on the ice for my first spearing season. When the fishing clubs plow and mark the roads, you can easily forget that you’re not on solid ground. And when there’s no snow, it’s very tempting to just drive as the crow flies to your destination. And that’s just what I did that year, darting here and there to visit whichever shanty looked most interesting. However, I don’t think I’ll ever be quite so casual on the ice again.

Shortly before People of the Sturgeon was going to press, Ron Bruch noticed that we hadn’t included a photo of Bill Casper’s shanty. Bill was the person who first got people together in 1977 to form Sturgeon For Tomorrow, a nonprofit group that has now raised more than $750,000 to protect sturgeon and learn more about them.

One of the first things you notice on Lake Winnebago is that spearing shanties come in all sizes, shapes and forms. Bill Casper’s happens to come in the shape of an overgrown Green Bay Packers helmet.

Normally I would have asked Bob Rashid, our book’s photographer, to schedule a shoot with Bill. But just a few months before, Bob died suddenly from a rare heart condition he didn’t know he had. There wasn’t much time before everything was due to the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, so the simplest solution was for me to go take a photo while Bill was out on the ice that season. I convinced my husband to spend Valentine’s Day with me on Lake Winnebago. He had become accustomed to requests like that by then.

Bill gave me very precise directions to his shanty over the phone. We were to head out on one of the main roads to mile marker 2 (marked with two Christmas trees) and then head due north for a certain distance. I made a mental note to bring a compass.

When we started out onto Lake Winnebago, I unbuckled my seatbelt and asked my husband to do the same. I tried to remember other precautionary measures to take in case your vehicle falls through the ice—oh yes, roll down your windows. There we were, cruising across Lake Winnebago in our Honda Fit with the windows down and the heat blasting.

We found the Packers helmet with no trouble at all—Bill’s directions were spot on. It was a gorgeous day, and to top it off, Bill had just speared a sturgeon. He was ecstatic. As we took photos of his shanty and chatted with him about his 70-pound fish, a helicopter flew over us heading north. We thought maybe it was a news crew doing a “shanty count.” We later found out it was MedFlight.

A father and his 9-year-old daughter died that day after the truck they were driving in fell through a crack as they drove from one shanty to another to visit friends. People speculated that the crack had probably frozen up slightly overnight, and then a dusting of snow had covered it so that it would have been impossible to see.

I thought about Bill Casper’s directions and realized why they were so precise—he wanted us to follow his exact route out to his shanty because he would have travelled it just a few hours before we did. That day was a sober reminder that as solid as it appears, ice is still a fluid substance that shifts and moves with changes in the temperature and wind. And it’s never one hundred percent safe.

So as spearers head out today to begin cutting in holes and setting up shanties, I hope everyone remembers to enjoy the season, but above all, be careful out there.