There are hundreds of days booked in my fishing logs and countless others banked in my memories.  From watching a field of tip-up flags pop for northern pike on a chilly winter morning to a steamy July evening spent fishing an inexhaustible school of white bass, it is tough to keep track of all the outings over the past decade or so.  To help with that task, each January I pull out my life list and add new fish I have caught in the last year, recall the biggest specimens I have landed and make note of others that I have hooked in my lifetime. 

Reports this month have many people across the region looking out their front windows with worry.  In the wake of back-to-back blizzards, the National Weather Service (NWS) released its early-season forecast for this spring’s flood potential for the upper Midwest.  Some form of flooding is expected when the snow pack melts, with the NWS predicting an 80 percent chance of moderate flooding and a 50 percent chance of major flooding in the southern Red River Valley.

As winter blankets, and blankets, and blankets the region with snow, it is becoming more apparent that it will be a long season indeed.  That’s not a bad thing if you need some time to get your tacklebox ready for one of open water’s early quarries – prespawn slab crappies! 

A post on the ice fishing forum of a website that I help moderate asked: “I paid $300 for an old sled shack and a Vexilar, did I get a good deal?” 

My response was as it usually is for these kinds of questions, “You’ll wonder how you ever fished without them.”