Reef in waiting

On a lake where most residents are seasonal or weekenders, social events are important. It's good to have extended contacts with people you otherwise would rarely see, people who enrich the lake experience. What kinds of events help pull your lake community together? On our Birch Lake, one activity is fish crib building. A couple of weekends ago I joined about a dozen other volunteers in building five cribs on the southwest lobe of the lake. They now sit out on the ice, awaiting the thaw that will allow them to sink to the bottom.

When I arrived that Saturday morning at the meeting place, the Birch Lake Bar, a few other laborers were waiting as a light snow fell, adding a bit to the six inches of light powder that had come the previous day. Soon more volunteers arrived, and we moved to a neighboring property where logs about ten feet long had been stacked, each one with a half-inch hole drilled toward both ends, a uniform distance apart. These were serious logs, some nearly a foot in diameter.

We wrestled two dozen of them into the beds of two pickup trucks -- some were heavy enough to require four men. Then we drove out onto the ice, needing all the power and traction of four-wheel drive to make it through the snow. We stopped out in the middle of that southwest lobe and went to work. First we dragged two of the biggest logs down and threaded lengths of steel rebar through holes at each end, Then it was a matter of threading the other logs onto those bars, in alternating directions, in the manner of Lincoln Logs, until we had a crib six logs high. Between log layers we piled on saplings and branches, so that the finished product took on the look of a porcupine.

Two cribs thuse built, we went back for another load of logs. And so it went. That morning we built five cribs. Each one would later be covered with wire mesh to help hold the brush in place, then festooned with concrete blocks that would speed their way to the bottom. The end result will be, in essence, an artificial reef in about 18 feet of water, in theory a magnet for walleyes in what otherwise has been a featureless and fishless stretch of rocky bottom.

I enjoyed my first venture in crib building and was glad to make a small contribution to the lake's continuing improvement. Most of all it was good to meet a few more of my neighbors -- we had a good time pointing out to each other the locations of our places along the wooded shore.

Now we just have to hope the cribs sink where we put them. There is always the chance that the lake ice will break up and that a floe carrying the cribs will drift elsewhere on a strong wind. Someone will need to watch where the cribs actually go down. Then it will be a matter of finding them, with help from a fishing sonar, when walleye season opens in May.