Late winter offers opportunities at monster pike in the shallows. Fish concentrate around submerged weedlines or on the edges of vegetated flats. (Photo courtesy of Clam Outdoors)
Sitting on beach chairs, my friend and I stared out through mirrored, polarized sunglasses as the sunshine warmed our faces and the morning. We were the only ones around for miles. It was college spring break, and while most everyone we knew had traveled south for boozy debauchery, we went north to the Minnesota-Canada border. Our goal was to fish the final days of the rapidly deteriorating, spindly and snow-free ice.
A line of tip-ups out in front of us kept us busy most of the day. "Flag up," one of us would announce, and we'd rise and trot excitedly over to a hole, alternating opportunities to land fish. The