A mild winter has put a damper on ice fishing this year, as ice coverage and thickness has been unseasonably low.
For most areas of the lake, it’s not safe yet to venture out on it.
You would probably have to go back to 2002 to find a year where the conditions were similar, and beyond that you would have to go back an additional 60-plus years, from what I can find, to find a similarly warm season.
Lake Simcoe has always been one of the most popular bodies of water for ice-fishing in the world.
I have partaken in the activity a few times throughout my life and it’s never been a pastime that I’ve ever been hooked on, so to speak.
And I am probably not alone when I say that maybe it’s time we give our old lake a winter off — a well-deserved break to heal itself as it slumbers under what little ice there is.
Having watched the extremely well-shot underwater video by local resident Kevin Biskaborn, which ran on BarrieToday last week, it got me thinking about the aquatic life under the waves that we normally don't get to observe with such clarity.
Seeing those large, shimmering schools of bait-fish weave about under the ice is a thing of beauty.
With an ever-growing city wrapped around the end of Kempenfelt Bay in a tight embrace, there are a lot of stresses on the lake, so maybe if we let it rest for a season, the number and overall health of fish would grow in lockstep with the time that it can be given.
During a good ice-fishing season, there have been more that 4,000 fish huts on Lake Simcoe at one time. Add in the countless number of anglers who travel out, drill a hole, plop down on a chair and fish the day away, well, you start to understand the stress that fish populations endure.
Of course, I’m not ignorant to the fact that tourism dollars add up to more than $20 million each season and it's good for our local economy, but if it is to be a sustainable enterprise, then maybe a break now and again can ensure those dollars never dry up.
Most people who use the lake respect it and see it as the valuable resource that it is, but there are many who litter, pollute and disrespect it as well. A nice long respite from that carnage would obviously be an added bonus as well.
But alas, before long in the not-too-distant future, this discussion will become a moot point anyway as global warming takes its toll, and with Lake Simcoe not freezing the way it has in past decades, this will become the norm.
So then why bother?
Think of it as an apprenticeship in the art of good stewardship that we desperately need to learn and practice if we are to be successful in protecting our waterways from threats today and even bigger threats tomorrow as Barrie grows and grows and grows.
Kevin Lamb is a Barrie-based freelance photojournalist, reporter and longtime contributor to BarrieToday.
