Today is the first day of the 2011 fishing season in Minnesota. You can buy your 2011 fishing license starting today even though 2010 licenses are good to the end of April. This year I get to pick up my first free license. I’m excited about what the new season will bring.
Being the first day of March, it marks the mental transition to Spring and Mother Nature obliges with warmer weather. As such, it also mentally marks the end of the ice fishing season. Realistically, we here in the frozen tundra probably have another few weeks on the ice, but as the weather warms up, the ice can get dangerous very quickly. I hope to get out once or twice more, but I probably won’t venture on the ice after the Ides of March.
And so the wait begins. The eternal, chomping-at-the-bit waiting that drives me crazy every Spring. Bass season officially closed this past weekend and won’t re-open again until May. Here in the Twin Cities, it won’t open until Memorial Day. Thankfully, my father-in-law’s cabin is in an area where bass season opens two weeks earlier. I don’t understand that reasoning as the weather and water is colder up there, so you would think the spawn would be later. But who am I to second guess the Minnesota DNR.
Either way, two and a half to three months is a long time to wait to partake in your passion. I may curb some of the uncontrollable twitching by panfishing with Mark this Spring. Who knows, maybe I’ll be lucky and catch a bass “accidentally.”
I don’t know if I’ll go up that first weekend as it also corresponds with the Minnesota Fishing Opener and everyone and their brother tries to get a piece of the action.
Wisconsin opens their bass season to catch-and-release in the first weekend of May, so I may have to make a trip across the border. Just so long as I don’t run into any Wisconsin football fans.
