Have you ever drilled an ice hole while you were out ice fishing, and found a nice buck in the ice? That actually happened to an ice angler when he was a teenager.
Check out his interesting hard water fishing story by the profile of stuckinohio via iceshanty.com:
The one memory that sticks out (maybe most of all) was when I was 14.
Memory tells me the snow depth on the ice was maybe a bit more than a foot and the ice was feet thick.I was chipping out holes with my chisel (for the tip ups) and on my first hole, about a foot down I hit something hard. I chipped around it and it looked like a stick that had been stripped of its bark. I whacked at it a few times and it didnt cut off. Clearing away the ice chips, I looked closer and realized it was not a tree limb but an antler.
I spent maybe an hour cutting a hole about 3′ round and exposed the head of an 8 point buck that had obviously fallen through the ice at least a month before. He was about 100 yards from the shore line on a pond with no current, so this is why I believed he had broken through.
By the time I had the head totally exposed, a few locals (who I knew) had come over to see what I was up too, so I had eye witnesses to the fact.
It still amazes me that, in all of that acreage, I started cutting a hole right on top of (I assume) the only deer on the lake
