Done at Red

Propane Detector that Really Works!

This month has been quite busy as you can tell by my late posts.  I have a lot of things going on in my world right now, hardly any time to do anything, even fish!  Hopefully it will be done soon and I can let you all in what's the big deal, but until then life continues, dang fast I might add!  So last weekend was the last trip to Red this year, as planned.  My friends Mark and Russ along with myself haul our wheel houses to JR's at the first sign of driveable ice which was December 15th.  Not the earliest and not the latest but a great start.  The plan was to bring it up on our first trip and leave the house at the resort till the last weekend in January.  With 2 trips in between, during Christmas vacation and the second week in January, it generally works out to 4 trips a year.  I just bought a new truck prior to our first trip and already trips to Red have accumulated 2000 miles, oh well I guess that's what trucks are for.  My original guest for last weekends trip ended up with the flu so my brother Steve filled in the spot, meeting me after my Friday morning meetings at around noon and we arrived at JR's around 5:00.  Russ had been there since Thursday night and Mark was about 2 hours ahead of me, and graciously giving me the reports of where the State Patrol were parked!  We kept in touch and definitely they had enough fish to treat us all to a walleye dupper at JR's and it wasn't long after we arrived, things got into full swing.  The last time I was at Red, I had some trouble with my 30 pound propane tank, it seemed froze up.  Whether this was the case or not, I brought it back with me and my neighbor Tim kept it in his heated garage for a couple of days and it seemed to work fine.  I use about 15 pounds of propane a day in my Salem Ice Cabin when the weather is cold, it wasn't too bad this trip however it is nice to make sure you don't run out.  Upon arriving I put the tank in the holders, started the furnace and hooked up the house to the truck.  The wind was blowing right into the side where the entrance door is, which is next to the furnace exhaust.  It really smelled like gas in the house but I assumed it was the exhaust fumes blowing back into open door so I opened the roof vents and pulled the house down on the ice.  This is a good strategy because it get's the house warmed up as well, I put my generator inside to warm that up so it starts good.  We went into JR's to eat, returning to our rig about an hour later.  Well, things should be nice and warm, we'll just follow Mark to where they are parked and go from there.  Walking by the house, a very loud alarm was going off so I opened the door and uffda, did it stink like gas.  Here the propane/LP gas detector was going off.  With the door and ceiling vents open, it cleared fairly quickly as I got the detector to stop beeping.  Checking around here one of the stove burner knobs were turned on and it was leaking propane into the cabin.   Damn lucky the whole thing didn't blow up! The nice thing about my furnace is the combustion chamber is sealed so it was just blowing the propaned saturated air through the heat exchanger and not near open flame, Uffda!!!  We did get the air cleared out yet everything in the house absorbed that smell so it too till Saturday night to start smelling normal.  I do have a Sensy candle in the house and that helps.  All I can say is if you have a propane powered anything in your wheel house or RV, make certain you have a working gas detector.  The house is a 2013 so I need to make sure of the Replace by date is not expired.

Bucket full of walleyes

Fishing Red this late in the season means getting close to Center Bar and finding an area where there isn't much traffic or houses around.  Red is a shallow lake and traffic on the ice can definitely affect the bite.  Never the less we did have a pretty active Friday night with the rattle reels going off with some regularity.  The last time I was there I let the others take care of that 2:00 AM sound but this time it was my turn.  By morning we had 3 nice walleyes in the bucket and missed a few.  Catching enough to take home, we decided to simply eat what we had which was fine with me.  Saturday was JR's Red Fest, an interesting event which is basically an indoor ice fishing contest.  You buy tickets then put your name on them, they get put in a bucket and if your name is drawn you get to draw from another bucket a piece of paper with a certain size fish on it, say a 12.5 walleye.  You can decide to enter it into the contest or release it and hopefully get entered again. It is fun and is the accumulation of the last 6 weeks of fishing on Red.  I have met some great guys including some of my customers, it's an innovative way to have a contest, by 4:00 its over and we head back to the house.  This time it wasn't as cold as a few weeks ago but Russ had picked and area that blew in with snow the day before.  It took a while to pack up and pull the house back onto the plowed roads but as they say, persistence pays off!  We cleaned the fish that went home with us, said goodbye to JR for another year, and headed south.  Admittedly it is sort of bittersweet leaving, the time is flying as it seems like we just pulled our houses up.  We had spent 9 days this year at Red, I would say that fishing was consistently good as we did eat fish most of those nights.  The size of the walleyes are perfect, in the 15 to 19 inch range, and in beautiful shape.  We did not fish for trout this last trip, as stated things just went too fast, maybe next year.

Clever is all I can say!

So the house is back home, Super Bowl is this week and it's time to start planning for our annual Leech Lake Opener that takes place in 15 weeks.  There is a lot to do before then as it is our 45th Annual and we like to try and do something special on the 5th year anniversaries.  One thing that drives me absolutely nuts is the fact that trailer license renewals are due in February when it is cold out.  It seems dumb to me because every year I renew the plates then wait till spring when it seems to be a better and warmer time to put on the tabs, and eventually forget were I put them and then the drama starts.  Eventually everything turns out good enough, I think this year I'm going to  tack them up where they will stay in front of my face all the time and see if it helps.  Each year it seems to get worse!  A final note, my brother Steve is from La Crosse and we are both Green Bay Packer fans.  We were talking about the NFC Championship game where Philadelphia defeated the Vikings.  Not to throw stones and I was somewhat sorry that the Vikings lost, he sent me a picture that I thought was quite clever!  Anyway there is always next year for both teams.