Though born too late to see American Indians chop holes in ice-covered lakes to spear fish, Irv Rubbelke has lived long enough to witness firsthand nearly all of the rest of Minnesota’s ice-fishing history. Rubbelke, of St. Paul, will be 100 years old in January. “When we fished in winter as kids, we used chisels to cut holes in the ice and sat on buckets in the open,’’ Rubbelke said. “We fished for crappies. But there weren’t many bait stores. We sent away for most of our worms.’’
How times have changed.
Today, fishing is Minnesota’s most popular winter sport. In December through February, tens of thousands of fishing shelters typically dot ice-covered lakes from Winona in the southeast to Warroad on the Canadian border.
On Lake Mille Lacs — historically the state’s premier walleye fishery, and the site, many winters, of more than 5,000 fish houses — Department of Natural Resources fisheries managers estimate up to 60 percent of the lake’s annual fishing pressure is applied by ice anglers.
Yet only 10 percent to 15 percent of the total annual Mille Lacs walleye harvest occurs in winter, suggesting the sport’s attraction differs in important ways from summer fishing.
“There’s something about being on the ice in winter that’s calming,’’ said Spider Johnson, who guides summer anglers on giant Upper Red Lake in northwest Minnesota and rents fish houses there in winter.
If that’s true, then Dave Genz should be nearly comatose, given how many days he spends on hard water in winter.
Considered a “father’’ of modern ice fishing, Genz, 66, of St. Cloud, was a teenager when his dad, Arnie, constructed what might have been the world’s first portable ice-fishing shelter — a development that foretold the revolution of the sport in the past 50 years.
“Dad built a structure that could be pulled onto the ice and moved around relatively easily in an attempt to find fish wherever they were biting,’’ Genz said. “It had two solid plywood ends and a plywood floor, with the other sides and top made of canvas.’’
Most winter fish houses until then were entirely constructed of leftover wood or other scrap, usually over two heavy wooden skids.
Once on a lake, these shelters were too cumbersome to move, considering their heft. Recalled Rubbelke, “I made my first ‘fish house’ in the 1930s out of scrap lumber. But back then we didn’t have cars that could pull the houses onto the lake. And even if we had, it wasn’t legal to drive on the lakes at that time.’’
Genz’s uncle, Gene Lease, of Sauk Rapids, rocketed the portable fish house idea forward in the 1960s when he developed the sport’s first flip-over shelter. Continue reading….
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