A few more points on ice safety. I don’t have a floater suit myself. But I’m careful.
When walking on thin ice (say less than 5 or 6 inches) take these precautions:
Two ice picks are important as said in an earlier post (they can also be two old screw drivers each with a hole drilled in the handle, or 8 inch nails) especially if by yourself. IT IS IMPORTANT to have the picks tied to your wrists with short pieces of chord (not stuck in your pockets). That way they are at hand if you go through.
A rope or an ice auger can be used as a reaching aid to save a buddy who has fallen through . Search “ice rescue” on you tube, it shows all the details. Approach the thin ice by crawling on your belly or rolling, when you do get out don’t stand up but instead roll or crawl back to the safe ice.
When walking , assemble your ice auger before going out on the ice and carry it held horizontally at your waist. If you suddenly fall through the auger will spread your weight over the ice a couple of feet to either side. This will hopefully stop you waist deep.
Another key piece of safety equipment is your car keys. If you are venturing onto thin ice make sure they’re in a zippered pocket above your waist. If you have fallen through and got soaked from the waist down you don’t want to be rummaging in wet, freezing pockets to get your keys. Time is critical. You want to get to your car asap, start the engine and change into a set of dry clothes that are in your car. These simple precautions can be the difference between an unpleasant soaking and a serious case of hypothermia.
In general, a prime reason for non-uniform ice thickness is the presence of current and turbulence under the ice that pushes deeper, warmer water to the surface. This both slows the rate of ice formation in areas where the current is present and can melt away the bottom of the surface of the ice even when air temperature is -2C or so (depending on the strength of the current). Here's a lsit of safety rules
1. Stay away from areas of high current. Avoid rivers, creeks and river mouths
2. Avoid narrows in lakes or between lakes since they can have currents due to water level changes which will move large volumes water through the narrows.
3. Avoid open water (stay more than 1 km away from large expanses of open water).
4. If there is open water with an offshore wind that tends to push the ice toward the water then stay off the ice altogether.
5. Be careful at the shoreline and in swamps
6. Avoid thick Snow on thin ice
7. The safest ice travel is walking on foot and probing with a spud.
8. Stay off ice altogether in spring (after numerous freeze thaw cycles). See the attachment for more detail.
The bad news is that the B of Q is closer to a river system than to a stagnant bay so you’re pushing against rule 1 by being out there at all. Small back lakes with little water flow in and out of them tend to be safest in the early season since they have very little current. A glance at a map shows that the Trent, Moira and Salmon rivers flow out through telegraph narrows. Add the Napanee River flow to all of that to get the flow through Long Reach.
The good news about the B of Q is that there are usually lots of people especially if the fishing is good. Follow tracks and don’t venture too far from the crowd and you’ll be okay.
Floater suitsI’ve heard that the big walleye like to mill in slow current regions under the ice. That makes spots with high current like Long Reach (and yikes, Telegraph Narrows) tempting targets. Fishing in places like that violate a couple of the rules listed above: avoid areas with high current, avoid open water. If you’re going to push the envelope regarding the basic safety rules listed above, yep, wear a floater suit.
I myself don’t fish in those locations.
Current and Knowing the IceA bit more on current. There are 2 main origins of current: gravity driven current and wind driven current. The good thing about gravity driven current is that it tends to be consistent in terms of location. The high current areas that have thinnest ice are also the areas that freeze last. It’s good if you can observe the ice forming since this gives a good idea of where the high current areas are.
Note however that gravity driven current can vary a lot with time. If there is a December thaw with warm rain at +5 C there will be a surge in the flow of creeks and rivers due to the combination of the rain itself and the snow that the rain melts. When it is freezing again a day or two later the increased current will not stop immediately but will slowly dissipate. A cold day after rain will give the impression that most of the ice is safe: frozen puddles in the parking lot, cold top surface of the ice, but the high current areas, e.g. Long Reach will still be even dicier than usual for a couple of days after the rainfall.
Wind driven current requires open water. A safe thing about small back lakes is that once they freeze over completely there is no wind driven current. The opposite extreme are the big lakes where wind driven currents will change in speed, direction band location as the wind shifts. The wind driven current will not immediately stop at the edge of the ice but . This all makes the ice quite dangerous for bodies of water with a lot of exposed open water. \
A particularly bad situation is open water with the wind offshore so that it pushes the ice toward the open water. This situation happened a few years back on Lake Simcoe when a number of ice fisherman took an “unscheduled cruise” on a giant ice flow that blew off shore.
I was thinking of making up a comedy routine called “You know you’re a technogeek when…..”
With apologies to Jeff Fox worthy.
“You know you’re a technogeek when you talk about the latent heat of freezing on a fishing website”
Anyway, the attachment goes on at length in excruciating detail about ice thickness uniformity and other ice related phenomena.
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