After an intense lobbying effort by the Maine Ice Angler's Association, Dunlap withdrew the bill almost in relief. "It was quite an educational process," he laughs now. "We looked at [ice fishing] as kind of an anachronism . . . like bobcat hunting . . .. We just didn't realize how popular a sport it really was."
Ice fishing has always had something of a roughneck reputation, as the province of hard drinkers and grumpy old men. To those who prefer to fish on liquid water, ice fisherman are cheaters who catch their quarry with multiple baits instead of one line. Ice fisherman carp back that theirs is the purer sport. "Let's face it," says Tim Jackson, founder of the Monmouth-based fish-trap manufacturer Jack Traps and a leader in the fight against the draft legislation. "When you got a $20,000 bass boat with a $20,000 truck you can do anything about as fast as you want. The ice fisherman is kind of old-school."
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Indeed, ice in Maine divides not just air from water but class from class. When the state freezes over, Maine is returned to Mainers one pond at a time. The waterfront cottages empty out and the laborers who built them are able to travel unhindered over the snow-covered lawns. "No Trespassing" signs are no match for the colonial-era Great Ponds Act which makes the liquid part of any Maine lake over 10 acres public property.
"A lot of [shoreowners] think the lake's theirs," says Jackson. "And it isn't. It's ours." When water becomes walkable, Mainers who can't afford a boat can reach prime fishing grounds they could never get to in summer. They mark their property lines with holes augered in the ice and red-flagged fish traps that flutter in the subzero wind. They establish residency in shanties cobbled together from construction scrap and household bric-a-brac.
