In the course of a year, you can probably find Jack Baker in one of two very different places: on the golf green or on hard water.
Relatively little occurs during the coldest months at the Summit Golf Club, which employs Baker as its resident PGA golf pro, outside Cannon Falls, Minn. So from the end of November until mid-March, Baker has more free time to pursue a sport very different from golf.
“Once those greens freeze up – the course actually stayed open until Dec. 4 last year – I say, ‘Let’s get to the ice,’ ” Baker said. “I don’t get to fish much in the summer, because it’s all golf, but in the winter, we fish hard.”
And by “we,” he’s referring to some young, intense fishing companions, one of whom already has joined Baker as an Ice Team Power Stick.
Baker’s daughter, Grete, now age 11, became the youngest-ever qualifier for the North American Ice Fishing Championship last year. She’s already as comfortable reading a Vexilar as she is a kid’s novel, and Jack Baker said that by late October 2007, she already was monitoring weather and talking about “first ice.” She and her dad are Ice Team PowerStick pros.
Originally from Minot, N.D., Jack Baker moved out of the Midwest for 10 years while his golf career evolved from playing on mini-tours, to Director of Instruction at a golf resort in Nevada before being named PGA Assistant of the Year in the Utah. For the last six years he’s been in the Cannon Falls area, and he considers it a great place to raise kids.
The access to quality ice fishing ain’t bad either. He fondly remembers Grete’s first ice adventure to Red Lake a few years back.
“It was during the hey-day of that crappie fishery, and it was an adventure in every sense of the word,” he said. “There’s the hike up there, plus all sorts of action – from pike pulling rods down the hole, to snagging the rods back up off the bottom, to lots of great panfishing. She had a fabulous time.”
At seminars and with his own kids, Baker preaches panfishing because they’re so accessible to anglers. That said, he qualifies that he and Grete maintain a “multi-species” approach. Grete fished her first Trap Attack event as a 7-year-old, and then qualified for the Ice Championship on Lake Carlos a couple years later.
And how did that go?
“It was a tough bite, and half the field didn’t catch a fish in two days of hard But seated in a restaurant on the way, Baker recognized a silver lining. While most kids would have focused on crayons and coloring the kids’ menu, Grete wanted to break down what went wrong with their fishing.
“We talked about all sorts of tactics, like whether we should have tried drop-shotting or punching a hole in the weeds,” he said. “By the end of that lunch we wanted to go back and give it another whirl!”
Other kids really respond to Grete when she and her father are conducting seminars or answering questions at a retail session. Jack Baker said he’s even noticed
“Adults typically don’t take her real seriously at first, but kids just gravitate to her,” he said. “She’ll be explaining how she tips or works a jig in real specific terms, and then one of these big (adult) guys will stop her and say, ‘Uhhhh, can you repeat that?”
When he’s not working or fishing himself, Jack Baker and his daughter have even conducted mini fishing clinics at area schools. Kids love when they demonstrate how to use an Aqua-Vu or Vexilar, and Baker entertains them with what he calls a “taser light show” with the chargers for glow lures.
Any angler can learn from one trick he’s employed to demonstrate underwater ice jig action. A few years back, he bought some very tall glass vases. Baker fills them with water, then kids and adults alike can view how ice jigs dart or tumble up close and in the heated indoors.
The same lure, depending on the type or position of a knot, can move very differently. He firmly believes no ice angler should tie on a lure without first understanding its motion.
“Everyone has a rhythm or jigging motion that they fall into,” he said. “It’s important to see how that motion develops under water.
“Anyone can do this at home, and you’ll learn a lot and develop new jigging techniques this way quickly,” he said.
At last winter’s Trap Attack events, Jack and Grete just missed out on qualifying for the 2007 North American Ice Fishing Championship, scheduled for Dec. 15-16 on lakes Henry and Agnes in the Alexandria area. That won’t stop them from being present for the big event, however, Baker promises.
Potentially joining Jack and Grete is 7-year-old daughter Carrin, who’s also become a quality little ice angler. Jack Baker and his wife have enjoyed watching a little good-natured inter-sibling ice rivalry erupt between the two.
“I think Grete might be a little worried that Carrin will qualify for the Championships at a younger age than she did!” he said.
Between his daughters, their friends, demonstrations, and tournaments, Jack Baker has some strong experience ice-fishing with kids. Youngsters take to ice-fishing quickly, but safety becomes an even bigger issue for young people, who tend to operate a million miles an hour, he says.
One reason he fishes panfish, especially with new young anglers, is because there’s usually fewer hooks involved. Walleye jig trebles can get caught in many places with any experienced angler.
Also, he cites a very serious concern: A small child can fall through a big, 10-inch-plus ice hole, he said. For that reason, small kids always are wearing a life jacket any time of year, and everyone is wearing one early season.
How will Grete, Carrin, and Jack approach the first ice just a few weeks away? Because of his day-job commitments, Jack Baker admits he can’t follow the advice of other Ice Team gurus to research locations via boat before ice-up.
But before heading out locally to the Faribault chain, the Bakers will thoroughly research water levels and try to understand whether weedline locations have changed since their last hard water excursions in March.
“We’ve had our best early season panfish success catching them transitioning just outside the weeds, picking up some late bug hatches,” he said. “If it’s super windy and cold, we’ll go deeper. If it’s warm and calm, then shallower. But we’ll always start with the healthiest green weeds.”
Are there any similarities between ice fishing and golf? Sure, Baker says, for starters both require a deft touch that one only can acquire through time, patience, and a lot of effort.
“You gotta work at it, but it’s easy to do that when you’re having fun – with both sports,” he said.By: Tim Lesmeister
