Flying Shanties

By

Gary L. Miller

Copyright 1985-2006

Non Exclusive North American Serial Rights to Michigan Darkhouse Angling Association’s Newsletter, Darkhouse Angler, One Time Use Only.

In Memory of Lawrence A. Miller (1917-1996)

One of the best descriptions of spearing I ever read was the “Dark House” chapter in Wilderness Days by Sigurd F. Olson.  Maybe I thought so because it most closely paralleled my own remembrances of pike spearing.  It’s a nice romanticized vision of the sport.  However, it fails to convey just how much work it really was.  It was an arduous task to get the shanty out onto the ice and set up and it required a great deal of maintenance once it was in place.  Almost daily it seemed to require jacking up to keep it from “freezing in”, a condition most feared by my father.  Once frozen in, it was almost impossible to free it.  He used to say the best solution to the problem was to “light a match to it and walk away.”

I remember one time in particular when we had the opposite problem.  It was back in the late ‘60s, I think, when we were spearing Lake Millecoquin in the Upper Peninsula’s Mackinac County near Engadine.  “Coq” as it’s sometimes called is a long narrow lake several miles long oriented in a North - South direction.  Most of the spearing, as I recall, was done on the South end near “Club Point”.  Anyway, this particular day, the weather was unseasonably warm and the lake ice was covered with a light skim of water from the snow melt and the banking around all the shacks had melted away thus freeing them from their anchorages.  Well, as sometimes happens in Northern Michigan, a strong wind came up from the south and all the shanties took off for the North end of the lake.  We got wind of the problem and my dad and I rushed over to the lake to see if we could rescue our shack.  It, as well as several others, had skated up into the shallow reed beds at the North end and we feared that it would either melt right through the ice or the temperature would drop and we would be faced with the dreaded “freeze-in”.  We drove the pick-up around to the public access site on the West side which is about half way up the lake and as it was deemed too dangerous to drive out onto the ice we set out on foot to retrieve our shack.  We hadn’t thought to bring along our strap-on ice creepers so hauling it back to the access site against the wind was no easy chore.  We were slipping and sliding and falling down onto the wet ice until we were totally drenched in ice water.  In order to make any progress against the wind we had to pull the shanty with a rope tied to one corner walking backwards with our backs to the wind. 

When we were nearly there we heard this strange sound, sort of a distant rumbling.  At first we thought it was just the ice “talking” as it sometimes does.  Then, one of us turned around to look and to our great horror we saw that another bunch of shacks had broken loose and were bearing down on us from the South.  Well, we let go of that rope in a hurry and made a mad dash for the nearest shore.  They missed us but we lost all the ground we had gained when our shanty joined up with the others and we had to start all over again. 

Whenever I think about that day on Millecoquin Lake I cringe and imagine what the headlines might have been; “Fishermen Killed by Flock of Flying Shacks”.

(An excerpt from a forthcoming book on Vintage Michigan Fish Decoys by Gary L. Miller.  Those wishing to communicate with the author may E-mail him at michifish@charter.net).