MANKATO — Curt Yess of Waseca is, by his own admission, no hard-core ice fisherman.

So he wasn’t above complaining about the sloppy weather forecast for the Brainerd area as he made the four-hour drive with his son-in-law, Colby Schmidt of Le Sueur and his friend, Bob Schlueter, to Gull Lake last weekend to participate in the Brainerd Jaycees $150,000 Ice Fishing Extravaganza.

“A four-hour drive up there, three hours of standing in the rain, another four-hour drive home ... I wasn’t all that excited about it,” Yess admitted.

The supervisor at Brown Printing was cajoled by his son-in-law into making the trip and ponying up the $45 entry fee for the annual event that draws upwards of 12,000 participants after another of Colby’s friend backed out at the last minute.

 Several hours later, he was singing a different tune after snagging the top prize, a new 4 X 4 GMC pickup truck with the 6.26-pound walleye he pulled through the ice in the opening minutes of the three-hour contest.

Yess originally wanted to fish in shallower water where most of the other entries were fishing, believing his odds of catching a small fish would be better there and might at least get him on the board with a chance at one of the 150 prizes that were being offered.

“But Colby said we had to go out to deeper water because that’s where the big fish came from in other years,” Yess said.

So they hoofed it to the edge of the crowd where Yess managed to find a snow drift that would keep him from standing in the slop that had accumulated on the ice from the rain and drizzle that fell.

A check with his son-in-law’s depth revealed 64 feet of water. But the flasher also showed a red blip about five feet above the bottom.

Since such marks frequently indicate a fish, he set his bobber stop so that his pink hook and minnow would be suspended five feet above the bottom when the contest officially started.

At noon, at the sound of a shotgun, some 12,000 lines went simultaneously into the water.

“You can imagine being a scuba diver down there and seeing 12,000 little minnows coming down at the same time,” he said.

Sixty-four feet is a long way down and after feeding all that line down the hole, Yess’s bobber settled only briefly on the surface, then slowly sank a few inches beneath the surface and remained there.

Too much weight? A bite?

Yess tightened the line, set the hook, and barely two minutes into the fishing contest, had a fish on — and a big one at that judging by the bow in his fishing rod.

After several minutes and several anxious moments when he managed to wind his bobber into the rod-tip guide bringing the fight to a temporary halt as his son-in-law corrected the problem, the big fish finally cruised past the hole cut in the two-foot-thick ice.

The anxiety level ratcheted up several notches. “When the head went past, I could seen that I only had it hooked in the lip,” Yess said.

Now, getting a fish that big turned and coming up through a hole in the ice is always dicey, a moment of reckoning when the difference between a fish caught and a fish lost is a fine one.

Once he had the fish turned, Yess didn’t hesitate.

He plunging his hand into deep into icy water, grabbed the fish, and pulled it up through the hole and onto the ice.

Cheers went up from the crowd of anglers who had gathered to watch the fight.

“It was pretty exciting,” Yess said.

Even so early in the game, Yess wasn’t the only successful angler. “There were about 100 people already in line  by the time I got to the weigh station.”

With his six-pound-plus fish now holding the top spot, all that was left to do was to fish some more and wait. “We certainly weren’t going to leave,” he said.

His fish was still in the top spot when the contest ended at 3 p.m., but a long line of anglers with fish caught before 3 p.m. and yet to be registered remained.

And then officials announced that another large fish had just been weighed and that the leader board would be cleared.

But it turned out that a 4.28-pound walleye caught in the closing moments bumped a 2.86-pound tullibee from second place to third, changing the standings for everyone except Yess.

Still holding the top spot, he had the choice of a new GMC or a new Ford.

He selected the black GMC that had a grand total of 27 miles on it when he got behind the wheel.

Driving his spankin’ new wheels home as his son-in-law and friend followed in him in his vehicle, he still managed to find something to complain about.

“Colby called me on the cell phone on the way home and asked how I liked driving the new truck,” Yess said. “I told him that the new-truck smell was giving me a headache.”



John Cross is a Free Press staff writer. Contact him at 344-6376 or be e-mail at jcross@mankato freepress.com.