Hard water fishing part deux.

AK Hunter said:

................ But I have used my kayak as an ice breaker before. LOL

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Now that reminds me of a funny memory..

Many years ago, my brother-in-law and I used to fish for smelts on the Ipswich River in Massachusetts. They used to actually get winter there where I grew up, and the river was frozen over. The smelt fishing was on brackish water and broken up by the tide, so the ice was never safe. There was a public landing that everyone fished from, but that was away from the main current so no one ever caught many fish from along that banking - just enough to keep everyone's interest up. Sometimes you got dozens, sometimes one or 2, and sometimes nothing.
We did see a brave soul get out onto the ice during a cold snap. He cut a hole, and did really well. Still the guy was always at risk of punching through and getting swept along with the current - under the ice. No one else was that crazy.

My BIL got the idea of bringing his flat bottom jonboat and sliding it on top of the ice. We put the gear in the boat and held onto the sides as we pushed the boat out to the middle, using the boat to support our weight. It worked great!
There had to be a hundred people along the shore laughing and ridiculing that we were fools for doing that. We were only about 20 yards away so we could hear everything.
So we cut our holes in the ice, rigged up the sea worms and started pulling out the smelts as fast as we could take them off the hook, re-rig, and dip it back into the hole. The ridiculing went silent.
We filled two 5 gallon pails in a pretty short time. We also noticed the onshore group was thinning out. The tide was running back out, so we packed up and went home.
Next morning, we slid the jonboat back out, about 2 hours ahead of high tide. We soon saw one vehicle after another driving up with boats of every kind you can imagine. My brother-in-law's flat bottom jonboat made sense, but others had Amesbury skiffs, canoes, some even still had their motors on them It was kinda comical seeing round bottom boats rocking away on the ice. The ice was soon completely covered with boats and everyone was catching tons of smelts.
I never saved it but there was a large picture of that in the Boston Globe on Monday morning.

We only went a couple of times after that. The freezer was pretty full, the family was getting sick of smelts, and Mom didn't want any more of them in her freezer.