Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/80912
THE FINAL CUT // BY ROGER SCHERPING, ICE TEAM PRESIDENT INSIDE THE ICE FISHING REVOLUTION No one witnessed the ice fishing revolution the way Dave Genz did. He likes to say that he has seen ice fishing go from the Stone Age to the Space Age. Genz recently gave us the ultimate insider's look at the revolution. "When I started ice fishing with my grandfather and evening thing. During the daytime hours they'd play cards, or you'd see families out there playing catch or ice skating. There wasn't a lot of fish catching going on during the daytime." my dad, it was all about the evening time or the morn- ing. You would get up early and go out to a known spot. Usually it was the deepest hole of the lake, and you'd chop some holes out there. You had a spud bar or an ice chisel that was made in a blacksmith's shop. They usually had a rope around the end that you could put around your wrist so that when you got through the chisel didn't go to the bottom. I think almost everyone has a story about hitting on the ice and it went through and losing your dad's chisel." "Before we had ice shelters we'd come out with a chunk of wood or a piece of canvas as a wind- break. I can remember building snow forts to keep out of the wind. Then you'd wait for the sun to go down or the sun to come up. That's when most of the fish fed. And that's the way people fished. It was a morning and was just a kid. "Every weekend my parents would go up to Mille Lacs with their friends, and during the daytime hours they would sit in their fish house and play cards. Now I'm not going to sit there and watch them play cards very long, so I would go out with a chisel and chop holes in the ice just for something to do. I'd chop a hole, and usually I'd catch a fish out of that hole. And I started to recognize that if I cut another hole I'd probably catch another fish. This would have been in the late 1950's." Years later, after serving in the military and working as a maintenance engineer, Genz told his wife, Patsy, that he was going to make his living in the ice fishing industry. "I went to my wife and said we're going to start building fish houses. I said, I need you to sew some for me. It was pretty crude the way we built those first ones, but we built 5, and the next year 20. The year after we built 80, and then my wife said she's not sewing any more fish houses." Genz remembers learning mobile ice fishing when he 34 ICE TEAM.COM >> THE ICE ANNUAL