“Back of the envelope, we probably got ice only eight out of the last 12 years.” “You can’t deny that the Earth is getting warmer unless every thermometer on Earth is broken,” he said. But Hageman could see what was happening. Like the two men at the Squirrel, he is quick to tell stories of past winters, including a tale about a group of old men trying to drive across the ice in a Lincoln Continental. Hageman, 63, also worked for years as an ice fishing guide on the island. It would be hard to figure it was anything else, said John Hageman, who for years managed the Ohio State University Stone Lab, a research facility on South Bass Island. ![]() Still, Stoiber acknowledged a grim possibility: “Maybe it’s climate change.” Sitting at the Squirrel and trading tales of past winters with Schroeder, he said there had always been bad ice years among the good ones. “Maybe it’s the usual cycle,” George Stoiber, 81, said of the last few disappointing winters. Still, among the longtime ice fishermen, hope dies hard. “It don’t freeze like it used to,” Parker said. Some of them had not even been ice fishing. The new year-rounders would not have any memory of winters when the ice was 2 feet thick. Parker and her fellow diners remarked that more younger people seemed to be staying on the island through the offseason. The yacht club, which was once closed all winter, hosted the soup dinner where Parker was communing with friends. Darts night is now twice weekly at Topsy’s. ![]() There is volleyball on Mondays and pickleball and yoga three days a week. They hardly see one another in the tourist season, when they work around the clock, trying to make enough money in one half of the year to get them through the other half.įor many longtime islanders, the season still revolves around the ice, but there are more things to do in the winter these days. The shutting down of most bars and restaurants in fall has always marked the start of the social season for those who live on the island. “The older islanders, they remember when you could drive all the way from here to Toledo,” said Aaron Schroeder, a carpenter and ice fishing guide known to his fellow year-rounders as Vern.īut it has been years since the ice was that kind of thick. In the old days, the ice usually got so solid that people in Put-in-Bay could drive the 5 or so miles to the mainland in a truck, and often they did. Ice coverage of Lake Erie this year has hit record lows. But the temperature always crept back up. The ice teased here and there in December and January, little shelves appearing in the harbors during short-lived frigid spells. “The men are going crazy,” said Linda Parker, who was at a community soup dinner with friends at the local yacht club. “We’re all cooped up,” said Dustin Shaffer, the pilot who flew me over, who later that night was drinking with other year-rounders at Topsy Turvey’s, the one bar that stays open all year. And without ice fishing, islanders repeatedly told me, there is not much point. Starting on my eight-minute flight from Port Clinton, Ohio, in a six-seater aircraft - in winter, the only way to get to the island - there was one question I was asked most often: Why are you here now? Without ice, there is no ice fishing. The Black Squirrel, one of the few inns open year round, would be packed with ice fishermen eating an early breakfast in the dining room, then taking their four-wheelers out for a long, cold day of catching walleye.īut while the fishermen showed up this year, the ice didn’t. Typically in late February, everyone would be out on the ice. “Your dad would be the second generation,” she said. It always has been, said Mary Ann McCann, 87, who was sitting at her dining room table with her granddaughter, counting the number of generations of her family that lived on South Bass. For most who live on the island year round and put up with the tourist season as an economic necessity, ice fishing makes it all worth it. The groups of ice fishermen who fly in to South Bass Island, where Put-in-Bay sits, bring a nice jolt of offseason cash, but that is just a side benefit. There are bonfires and cookouts, banquets and impromptu parties people sail ice boats, go ice skating and drive snowmobiles across the ice to visit friends on neighboring islands. When it begins, usually at some point in January or February, dozens of ice shanties sprout on the glorious pavement of a frozen Lake Erie.
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