AL McINTYRE
Petrie Island, Feb. 3, 2017.
“The biggest fish I’ve caught here was probably about a sixpound walleye, but the biggest one I’ve seen come out of this bay was 15 pounds. Now that’s not common, but I’ve seen eight- and nine-pounders here in the bay, while out at the drop your chances of getting a bigger fish are greater because you’re near the mouth of the open river down there. Sturgeon are not open, but there are big sturgeon that are caught out there and have to be released right away. But they’ll go up to 15 or 20 pounds. There’s big pike, the occasional muskie. You get big fish here. And of course you get all the perch and little crappie and the blue gills. It’s all fun.
“I got interested in ice fishing when I lived in Sudbury in 1960 as a kid. My dad took me out and I loved it. Ever since I was 10 or 12 I’ve been fishing with my buddies, and ice fishing was a big part of that. It’s a fun way to get out in the winter.
“I used to fish at Clarence-Rockland, but the huts over there always got broken into, so I came down here to Petrie
Island in 2002, when there were only 10 or 15 huts, and we started to get to know one another, and now there are 140 huts. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s safe because we’re in a bay here; there’s not a lot of flow. And there are lots of fish.
“I like to have a lot of memories and things on the wall. People come into the hut and spend the first two minutes just looking around. I get a kick out of that. And there are a lot of other huts like mine out on the ice, and if you get a chance you should visit them. But with me it’s mostly old stuff. I want my cabin to look like a 1940s hunt camp.
“Our first day on the ice this year was Jan. 2. It was the only day the ice was good to get on with a truck, and we brought 10 huts on the ice. The next day the ice was no good so we had to walk on it for the next week and a half. But in the last three or four weeks I’ve probably been out here for 20 of those days. My wife’s had a cold so she didn’t want me around anyway. So it was perfect for me.
“I do tons of fishing. I always have a line in. But it’s always social. Today I have my buddies Al and his wife come in from Montreal. I’ve got another buddy coming in from Montreal. It’s super social, and in the evening when the fishing dies down a little bit, everybody goes from hut to hut to visit and move around and meet people. It’s fun. It’s a village. Two new skating rinks were built last night, and a curling rink went up last night at around midnight. There’s a perimeter road that goes around the village where people cross-country ski, go on the quads — kids on fourwheelers.
“I live 12 minutes away, in Rockland, but in the winter this is my home.”