The boys are having a good time horsing around on the glare ice!
Thompson’s Ice Pond is a miniscule 1-acre body of water located in the town of South Bristol, Lincoln County, Maine (see The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer map 7 C3, but the pond is not shown due to its small size). The pond is situated at the intersection of Route 129, which runs between Damariscotta and South Bristol, and McFarlands Cove Road. I recommend searching Google Maps for “Thompson’s Ice House, South Bristol, Maine” to see its actual location. Note that a depth map is not available. Thompson’s Ice Pond is a small shallow reservoir associated with the Thompson Ice House Harvesting Museum, which is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Plenty of parking space is available next to the pond. Why bother with such a small potato? A review of the 2020 fish stocking report issued by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife shows that this tiny pond received 250 8” brookies and 50 13” brookies last fall. Do the math. That works out to an astonishing 300 brook trout per acre! Beware that between October 1 and May 31, the pond is reserved exclusively for kids under 16 years old using only two lines per person (click here for more details).
Geovani is bringing his lunch back home!
I arrive at Thompson’s Ice Pond by 8:30 am accompanied by my grandsons Geovani and Antony. They are both excited because neither has ice fished for a while. The reason for bringing them to this spot this morning is that it is essentially guaranteed they will catch trout. Plus, the weather is really nice with balmy temperatures in the low 40’s. Given these conditions, I am delighted that we have the pond all to ourselves. That, of course, suits me just fine. I am also surprised that the ice is not peppered with ice fishing holes. In fact, I can hardly see any. It does not look like this little pond is hit very hard by the local hard-water youngsters. I fire up the auger to drill four holes and am expecting a solid 16″ to 18″ of ice. Instead, I break through after a measly 6″… My goodness, it has been such a strange winter this year that a shallow 1-acre pond could barely grow a half foot of ice in 2.5 months of winter. That’s pretty bad…
There’s gotta be trout down there…
I set up four traps baited with 2″ shiners placed half-way down the water column in 3 to 5 feet of water. As always, before adding the bait fish, I slide a scented salmon egg on the hook to add a visual and olfactory pizzazz to my offerings. Somewhat to my surprise, we do not get any flag action for the next 45 minutes. So, we entertain ourselves by playing “ice soccer”! The surface of the ice is a slippery glare sheet. Geovani finds a spot with some open water along the shore and succeeds in breaking off a piece of ice which serves as our “ball”. We are having a grand time kicking it back and forth and running after it when one of the flags finally pops up. Geovani arrives at the hole first, yanks out the trap without looking down, and unceremoniously sets the hook. It is not by the book, but he catches and lands a one-pound brookie. Good, the trout are at their post. Out of habit, I check the bait at the other three traps and am flabbergasted to discover that all three remaining hooks are fishing naked! No wonder the flag action was slow… Brook trout have this uncanny ability to detach a baitfish from the hook without triggering the flag. And they only have their mouth to pull this trick off! I have seen this peculiar behavior many times in the past.
I told you so! The boys would have caught many more trout if only they could have stuck with jigging.
I rebait the three hooks and make sure to check the traps every 10 to 15 minutes. And good thing too because the baitfish keep on disappearing. But now we finally hit our strides. The fishing action is continuous over the next 1.5 hours. We get a total of 11 flags and the boys land six brookies, two of which come home for lunch. I also set them up for jigging. We have an ideal set-up here to introduce them to this productive fishing technique: a small confined pond loaded with hungry and active trout. Unfortunately, the boys are just too distracted and cannot stick with it long enough to make it work, even when the fish are constantly hitting their lures. Antony does succeed in catching a brookie on his jig but then quickly loses interest. That is really too bad because they could be catching lots of trout right now if they just focused on the task. But having a good time is the whole point of our outing so either way is fine. It is now 11 am and we have run out of bait. It is time to call it good. We had a successful morning: the weather was fine, the outdoors was fun, the fish were active, and the boys had a great time. Life is good!
This is soooo much more entertaining than jigging!
The results: The boys caught 6 brook trout (the largest fish measured 13”) after 2.5 hours of fun ice fishing.
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