As I write this, a paper-thin skim of ice has stretched across only the smaller lakes and ponds near NAFC headquarters. The bigger waters are merely rimmed with the hard stuff, and with mild weather predicted through the next 10 days, they’re going to stay that way for awhile.
It’s getting to be limbo time—there’s a bit too much ice to fish open water, and too little ice to fish from it.
The conditions remind me of a really cool ATV (of sorts) that I got a chance to fish out of late last winter:
The Wilcraft.
I’ll let the
video I shot that day speak for itself, but for now it’ll suffice to call the thing an amphibious ice-fishing vehicle—and that’s cool even if the only hard water you’ll ever see in your part of the country is floating in a drink.
Speaking of floating, the Wilcraft floats in the event it falls though the ice, which is fairly unlikely since its minimal weight is distributed across a large footprint and
big, gooey tires.
All this makes it a fisherman’s dream vehicle, because you can safely access the ice at the two best times of winter to be fishing—right after it’s formed in early winter and immediately before it goes out in spring.
Even better, rigged with the
right options, a Wilcraft also functions as an ice fishing shelter—or even a hunting blind.
Starting at about 10 grand, they don’t sound cheap. But when you consider that’s in the ballpark of many standard 4-wheelers, it’s really not bad—especially since you still get most of the benefits of a standard quad, along with the amphibious qualities and ice shelter.
Ryan