Last week I discovered that fishing when its -25C is not for the faint of heart. I had my ATV fail me
followed by my electronics so i spent the day fishing blind
. The bitterly cold temperatures causes stuff to break and keeps you from fishing a secondary line outside of your hut. The water in the hole would start to freeze immediately after drilling. One discovery I did make that may help ice fishers is a product i occasionally use while duck hunting. its called a quiver magnet and is meant to keep a small area of water from freezing so that your duck decoys do not freeze and also add some movement to your spread. they are the size of hockey puck, and run on 2 AA batteries. Mine ran most of the day of the 2 AAs.
after drilling the hole and cleaning the slush you toss one of these into the hole and viola, your hole will not freeze. my buddy and i fished all day on Wednesday in those frigid temperatures and the holes stayed open all day. the only requirement is to clean the edges with a knife every hour or so to keep the full hole size. the only other caveat is that it can only be used for dead sticking as jigging would cause your line to freeze up almost instantly. Even after an hour the only maintenance needed was to clean the ice ball around the water line. I simply would place the ice ball in my teeth and break it with my teeth.
The video isn't the best but shows the results.
http://youtu.be/mEAgS3HhTps