592 
FOREST AND STREAM 
October, 1918 
ANGLING FOR ADIRONDACK FROSTFISH 
THE DELICATE FROSTFISH OF NORTHERN WATERS MAY BE SUCCESSFULLY TAKEN WITH 
HOOK AND LINE IF METHODS ARE ADAPTED TO ITS PECULIAR CHARACTERISTICS 
By EDWIN T. WHIFFEN 
A S an angling proposition, Namaycush 
is rather an uncertain factor. Some¬ 
times he will bite, and sometimes he 
will not. You may go out to your buoy 
of a morning, prepared to finish your in¬ 
terrupted nap, and hardly get comfortably 
settled before nibble, yank, wake you up, 
and you are fast to one. You get him in 
and bait up again, then clean the fellow 
you have just caught, or are half-way 
through the process, when the antics of 
your rod signify that you have, another on 
the wire. You get chap number two in 
and start the cleaning process again, when 
a third victim falls to the wiles of your 
lure. Then you have visions of a record 
catch, and fish enough to furnish Manhat¬ 
tan with its breakfast. You are now thor¬ 
oughly awake; “not poppy, nor mandra- 
gora” could put you to sleep. You hang 
around your buoy three mortal hours, ex¬ 
pecting every second to get a hurry-up 
message. And every fish has gone on 
something that cannot be called a strike. 
Again you go out in the early hours, and 
sit like a wooden mummy over your rod. 
You got up because you couldn’t sleep, or 
because the black flies, or the punfcies, or 
the mosquitoes, or the deer flies had de¬ 
signs against your peace. Nothing at all 
suspiciously like even a nibble comes any¬ 
where near your bait. Life becomes in¬ 
tolerable. The boat-seat gets harder every 
minute. You are sure that the maker 
neglected to use the soft side of the plank. 
What are you going to do about it? The 
answer, if you are in the right locality, is 
—Adirondack frostfish. 
Sometimes, when you are baited up with 
a minnow or cut-bait, and sitting at your 
buoy, hoping that the grandfather of all 
the lakers will take hold, far down in the 
water, at the end of your sixty-foot line, 
you feel a gentle nibbling and pulling that 
remind you of the time when, as a bare¬ 
footed, freckle-faced youngster, you had 
great sport, trying to catch the “minnies” 
that fooled with the bait on your bent pin. 
You remember how they strung you on, 
nibbling and letting go, playing with the 
bait, and teasing you, until you vowed you 
would get one, just to show that you could 
do it, anyway. So now, you hardly know 
whether you have a bite or not. If you 
strike, you get no result. Can there be a 
crayfish, “crabs” as they are locally known, 
attempting to divorce your bait from your 
hook? Or are there minnows at that great 
depth which play cannibal and try to de¬ 
vour one of their own kind? 
I F you really want an answer to your 
question, fit yourself out with the fol¬ 
lowing rig. A fine braided silk line, 
preferably black in color, and about G or 
H in size, twenty-five yards in length. 
Your sinker should be as small as possible 
to carry your line to the bottom—about 
as large as the bullet of a .22-short car¬ 
tridge. Hooks snelled, number eight or 
ten. Attach one above and one below your 
sinker at the end of the line. Bait? Cer¬ 
tainly. One or two pieces of canned corn 
per hook, a piece of squirming angle worm, 
or a small piece of cut-bait, about as big 
as a good-sized pea, preferably from the 
tail-end of a three-inch minnow’s carcass, 
leaving in a piece of the backbone and 
some of the tough skin. Run your hook 
down through the bait in such a way as 
to fasten it on as firmly as possible. 
Lower away gently, until you feel the 
sinker strike on bottom, then pull up a 
foot or so, and wait—usually not for a 
very long time. “Nibble, nibble, gnaw,” 
like the rhyme in the goblin-story, will 
soon tell you that there is something doing 
downstairs. After a few of these twitches, 
a decided jerk will come; whereupon give 
a slight strike, and then pull away steadily, 
as you feel something alive at the business 
end of the line. “Keep ’em a-coming” is 
the watchword; and, if you are lucky, you 
will soon see the cause of the disturbance 
running frantically in small circles, and 
pulling away for dear life. Fight? Got 
a laker of the same caliber “skun” a mile! 
A short swing into the boat, in case of a 
small one, or a deft sweep of the net with 
those of larger size, will bring in a slender 
fish of a beautiful pearly tint, with fins of 
pale pink sometimes, a large full eye, and 
a rather small head; the mouth is surpris¬ 
ingly diminutive for a fish of this size, 
slightly sucker-shaped, with soft, tender 
lips. Hence the twitching, nibbling style 
of bite, and the instructions, when you 
handle it on the line, “keep it a-comin’,” 
but treat it “as though you loved it.” Your 
prize is the delicate, beautiful frostfish of 
the Adirondacks, difficult to catch, per¬ 
forming like the sport that it is, and in the 
frying pan, gods of the anglers!—white, 
flaky—um! Laker again “skun.” Fried 
The water must be absolutely calm 
with bacon, hum! You won’t be sorry that 
you captured this fellow instead of Namay¬ 
cush, or fontinalis himself. It is quite 
true that many of the non-game fishes, 
properly prepared, rival in flavor their 
more aristocratic brothers. 
T HERE are certain preliminaries 4 to 
be gone through. You should first 
find out the character of the water as 
to depth and bottom. Rig up a heavy 
sinker on a twenty-five yard line, with a 
smear of fat on the end of the lead. You 
want a depth of from forty to sixty feet 
on a rocky bottom. Go out in your boat 
or canoe, and take soundings in represen¬ 
tative places, until you find a likely spot. 
If there is a conspicuous rock, or tree, or 
other landmark on shore, it will help you 
in locating the buoy. Take an old cloth 
sack, and put twenty or more pounds of 
stones in, to serve as an anchor. This plan 
is better than to use one large stone or a 
few big ones. Tie a rope, sixty feet, or 
so, long, to this sack, and attach a float of 
sufficient size to the other end. Tote this 
arrangement to the spot you have picked 
out, and lower away until your anchor is 
on bottom. Then adjust the anchor rope 
so that there is a foot or so of slack line, 
to allow for a little play on the rope, when 
the wind kicks up a “sea” on the lake. The 
buoy should be baited every other night 
with small pieces of cut-bait. 
The best times to fish seem to be in the 
morning, from five to eight o’clock, or so; 
and in the evening at about the correspond¬ 
ing-hours. The water must be absolutely 
calm—not a breath of air stirring; your 
boat or canoe must lie absolutely still—or 
you get no fish. The bite is so delicate, 
that a slight rocking of the boat prevents 
you from knowing when the proper time to 
strike has come. Hence the period when 
you can do fishing of this sort is not a very 
frequent one. 
The size of the catch is not startling— 
from one to three fish being the usual num¬ 
ber obtained in fishing three hours or so. 
You will get many bites, often; you will 
haul your would-be capture through nearly 
sixty feet of water, until you can almost 
or quite see it; and then a slackening of 
the line announces plainly: “Sorry, old 
chap; important business elsewhere; see 
you later.” 
T HE capture of this fish is justly 
esteemed an important event in the 
Adirondack angler’s life. Its taking 
requires fine tackle, a knowledge of the 
waters to be fished, and a patience in keep¬ 
ing with the motto: “Try, try again.” In 
biting, a laker will usually make fuss 
enough so that you know something or 
other is really ready to do business; a 
“speckle” will grab your bait and start off 
like a commuter’s train intent on making 
up lost time; but a frostfish pulls gently 
away, must be hooked at the proper time, 
and handled with all due circumspection, 
or business becomes slack, and, when you 
haul in your line, two small bare hooks 
give the reason. 
The frostfish, as usually taken, is about 
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