A student in Julia McFarland’s class at Egan Junior High asked “how often do you have to redrill the holes in the ice.”

The answer is… well it depends. Two factors really impact this 1) how often you tend to it and 2) the time of year. Early in the season (around august through November) the ice is still thickening and it is cold out. In conditions like this it can take as little as a week until it is very difficult to re-open the hole to below. A chain saw will still work but at some point the ice has grown on the sides that one can’t fit down the hole ever if there is open water at the top. If we go out and chip it open every couple to four days, even at that time of year, then the hole will stay good for about a month. However, a hut makes a big difference and we dove out of the same hole that we drilled at the end of August until December with very little work (although we were in and out of it all the time.) So anywhere from a few days to 4 months.

This time we needed a hole to stay open that couldn’t be tended – the solution? A BIG hole. This hole has been open for over a month and not covered up. You can see that we (and I use the Royal we – meaning mostly Terril and Martin) have been chipping only half of it as it was so big. However this is also possible because of the time of the year

This is the bottom of the ice right now, and what you can see is many ruts and lines of erosion as the water is slowly melting it away from below. This creates a place for fish to live and algae to grow but also means that we don’t have to worry too much about the ice actually sealing up the hole again. On windy days it gets a frozen crust, but nothing that a bit of hard work can’t crack back open.