Dave Genz: Ice Revolution
Bringing ice fishing out of the stone age
By Mark Strand
Part of the Winter Fishing Systems
Cutting Edge Ice Fishing Series
Dave Genz: Ice Revolution © copyright 2012 by Dave Genz and Mark Strand. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, by photograph or xerography or by any other means, by broadcast or transmission, by translation into any kind of language, nor by recording electronically or otherwise, without permission in writing from the authors, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in critical articles and reviews.
ISBN: 9781624885136
Written & edited by Mark Strand and Dave Genz
Cover design by Mark Strand
Layout & design by Mark Strand
Published by Winter Fishing Systems, Inc.
5930 16th Ave SE
St. Cloud, Minnesota 56304
To order print copies of Ice Revolution
• Order securely online at www.davegenz.com.
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Winter Fishing Systems, 5930 - 16th Ave. SE, St. Cloud, MN 56304.
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Bluegills! book and Bluegills! DVD
To the spirit of mobility that keeps us all looking for biters
Dedication
Introduction
A Brief History of the Ice Fishing Revolution
Growing up on the Ice
Spoon Auger and Other Changes
Gradual Revolution
Then Came the Fish Trap
Selling the System
‘Electronic’ Depthfinders
Long Rods in Miniature
Goodbye Bobber, Hello Colored Maggots
A System Emerging
Efficiency: Another Part of the System
New Ways to Hang On
Pre-Skimming Holes
The Business Side of the Revolution
Learning Together
The Press Really Takes Notice
Barnstorming and Promoting
Trap Attacks had a Huge Impact
Peering into Ice Fishing’s Future
What has it Meant?
A List of Revolutionary Accomplishments
Revolutionary Honors
This is the story, from behind the scenes, I guess you’d say, of pretty much my whole life in ice fishing. What a ride it’s been. It would have never happened without my father, Arnold “Arnie” Genz, who took me out ice fishing from the time I was a wee lad. He had lots of time to fish, all winter long, so that meant I did, too.
My uncle, Gene Lease, built the first fish house that flipped up and down, back in the 1950s. It looked a lot like what the Fish Trap does today. He played a huge part.
My family was not just with me every step of the way, they were in there doing things that kept the revolution building. My wife, Patsy, sewed all the first Fish Trap covers on our home sewing machine. Then, after the business grew she went to college and got trained in business, using what she learned to help steer Winter Fishing Systems through numerous stages.
My daughters, Melissa (Missy) and Kathy assembled Fish Traps, packed live bait orders, helped run the Trap Attacks and did much more. They continue to work with me to this day. Every day, they’re a blessing and a positive influence on my life.
To all of my friends who have fished with me, shared ideas, and helped make all this happen, all I can say is thank you. You all played an important part in the ice fishing revolution.
– Dave Genz
Despite being around Dave Genz a lot since the mid 1980s, spending countless hours either interviewing him or watching him fish, and supposedly helping to document what he was doing, it turns out that I didn’t know the story behind the modern ice fishing revolution as well as I thought.
For one thing, I had cooked up this vision in my mind of a young Dave frustrated by the limitations of ice fishing, dreaming up solutions to everything instead of doing his homework. The real picture was a young Dave being raised in a family where ice fishing was an everyday activity all winter long, and all concerned were more content than you might think with the sport as it existed at the time. They were catching a lot of fish using their own versions of what was available in the way of tools and techniques. They loved the sport, and that’s why they kept going out on the ice, chopping one hole at a time, fishing three arm-lengths down with a minnow under a bobber, waiting for prime time, when the fish would start biting.
Now, Dave refers to those days as the Stone Age, and they were.
That all comes with full perspective, now that transformative change (led by him) has swept over the sport. The way it went down at the time was more like this: the Genz clan was loaded with handy types who could build and fix things, even come up with original ideas for new things and build them. They used ingenuity to improve upon existing ice-fishing tools one at a time, as the thoughts and opportunities came. Each improvement was happily added to the routine and they fished on, slightly more advanced than they had been.
By the time he was a young adult, Dave had amassed more time on the ice than almost anybody does in a lifetime. He had figured out the importance of remaining on the move to catch fish, and was starting to compare directly, from his own experiences, what he did while fishing from a boat in the summer to what was being done on the ice. The disconnect made no sense to somebody whose brain majors in common sense and ingenuity, and he started to connect a lot of dots. That process helped him see that ice fishing did not have to be the physically challenged stretch of the angling year.
But even with these congealing thoughts, Dave was not a malcontent while out on the ice. He kept going ice fishing every day all winter, because he loved it. Not because it was something to do to pass the time until spring.
The true picture of the modern ice fishing revolution – even though things happened quickly when viewed in a long-range context – is that of its principal driver happily latching onto every improvement as it came along, making his favorite winter sport all that much better.
What really drove it? There were multiple things. The biggest factor, arguably, was that Dave Genz is one of those anglers who loves to explore new waters. He knew from experience that, in order to do well beyond your own local lakes, it took either enormous amounts of free time or some tools that would allow meaningful and efficient, run-and-gun experimentation.
Wanting what he had in the summertime spurred his tinkering on behalf of winter time.
It started with his uncle Gene’s original creation, a super-portable ice shelter that, at the time of its invention in the 1950s, just made it faster to get your butt anchored over the one hole you were going to chop through the ice. Years later, Dave saw that house for what it was, after other pieces were being assembled into a system. Foremost among those was a flasher, adapted for use down the same hole you were fishing out of. But equally crucial was the development of better augers. There is no mobility if it isn’t easy to pop a lot of holes in the course of an outing.
Mobile equipment, absent the ability to “drill, baby, drill,” means nothing. One of the hard truths about ice fishing.
There were other things, like the development of graphite rods that perform like long rods built in miniature, jigs designed to get up and down quickly and show up well on a flasher, trailers with skis under the tires hauled behind a snowmobile or ATV, and better clothing. The list goes on, a list that has Dave Genz’s fingerprints all over it at every turn. His life spent on the ice allowed him to imagine what else was needed. His tinkering mind came up with designs for pieces of the puzzle that didn’t exist, and for ways to adapt existing tools for use on the ice.
When the dots began to connect, big changes came quickly on the leading edge. He didn’t just shake up ice fishing. He transformed the sport so completely that fundamental change of this magnitude will never happen again. Knowing what he and his friends had created, there were a lot of paths Dave could have chosen, including just keeping his mouth shut and spending the rest of his days kicking everybody’s butt from one end of the Ice Belt to the other. But this is not his makeup, so destiny thrust him into the leading role as both driver and sharer of the new way.
P.S. There are many ways we could have told this story, but we’ve chosen to present much of it as a first-hand account, a conversation between Dave and the reader. Especially in the early days, this is how he spread the word of the revolution, one angler at a time, out on the ice.
He responds honestly and thoughtfully to questions, and being able to react to questions helps him get warmed up, helps him remember important stories and details that are hard to just call up on their own. Because of this format, the discussion can seem to wander a bit at times. But that’s not such a bad thing, especially when Dave slips in a bonus fishing tip while talking about something business related. Kind of keeps you on your toes, turning the pages, because you don’t know for sure what’s coming next.
For a lot of reasons, this seemed like a good way to get this story down, before it’s forgotten.
– Mark Strand
Let me tell you a story about a sport that will never be the same, largely because of the lifelong passion and vision of one man. Now that we know how it all turns out, it might not seem like quite the leap of faith it was when Dave Genz made the bold decision to leave the reassuring paycheck and benefits of his day job and go headlong into the fishing business. Not the established business of open-water fishing, where others were making a go of it as professional anglers. Genz became the world’s first (and to this day the only) fulltime professional ice fisherman.
You gotta believe you have something special to jump out of that plane.
Genz knew that much. He knew what he had in the Fish Trap, the specially-modified flasher, the graphite ice rods, the improving augers. He had a system that he, Rick Johnson and other friends were using to fish through the ice in ways that were just like “summer fishing” (as he calls it) in some ways – and better than summer fishing in other ways.
Imagine what it was like in those days, being the only ones on the lake with these eye-popping inventions, flitting from hole to hole, dropping the flasher into the hole and watching your jig sink. Feeling that crisp sensation of the jig transmitted to your fingers through the rod. Seeing fish come in on the depthfinder. Teasing the fish upward. Feeling the bite and putting another fish on the ice. Flipping open the Trap to look around at the earthlings eyeing up the little space ship, looking at you, thinking about poking themselves in the eye with the sharp end of their antiquated jiggle sticks, to see if it was real.
But, still, to leave a secure job that promised a comfortable retirement fund and roll all the dice out on the ice was something nobody had ever done. Ice fishing was still thought of as a glass-half-empty way of passing time until spring thaw, playing catch with a football, playing cards, consuming adult beverages, catching the odd fish that randomly crossed your path.
It wasn’t a sport at all, in the same way that “summer fishing” was.
Looking back on it now, Genz says he pictured, even in those days, a future where “people fished in Fish Traps and used them like they used their boats in the summertime,” a vision that has come to pass. Nowadays, in many parts of the Ice Belt you can look out over a frozen lake and see clusters of little blue shelters, some settled in over a hole in the ice and others moving across the surface between spots.
Really, Genz changed ice fishing into what it should have been all along. But that’s easy to see now. No matter how good the revolutionary ideas were, the public needed time to grasp concepts that differed from tradition.
As it turned out, the same guy who came up with the ideas was also the right guy to sell them to us. Dave Genz is allergic to telling fish stories, and he’s the opposite of a carnival barker. He’s a fisherman, through and through. He looks the part, and he’ll talk fishing with anybody. So with the blessings of his wife Patsy (who, by the way, sewed all the Fish Trap covers in the early years), Genz began going from lake to lake, bait shop to bait shop, selling his new winter fishing system, a crusade that became the modern ice fishing revolution.
It took years. A lot of years. Like similar stories from other walks of life, plenty of folks would have given up long before the finances began to make sense. But Genz trudged through the snow, pulling his Fish Trap behind him, going up to people and showing them, smiled over his fish pictures at stores and seminars, kept selling us the future until we latched onto it.
In late 2012, as this book is being written, Dave’s garage workshop is full of the latest Fish Traps, Vexilars, rods and reels, jigs, and other stuff. It’s a tangle of wires and batteries and lights, as he gets things set up the way he wants them. Ice will form somewhere by Thanksgiving, and he will be on it, and won’t come off until late April when the last of it has melted.
The van in the driveway, specially customized with racks that hold Traps and other gear, will pull his trailer and all his stuff from state to state and across Canada, on his annual tour of the Ice Belt.
As he presses on into the future, we take a look back to the beginning, because it’s one of the most remarkable stories in the history of fishing.
Listening to the man who was there and lived through it seems like the best way to tell this story, so we’ll keep him talking and ask questions as we go. Here it is, a brief history of the modern ice fishing revolution, through the eyes and the memories of the man chiefly responsible for it.
Arnold “Arnie” Genz, Dave’s father
Before Dave Genz became the face of the modern ice fishing revolution, he was a little kid growing up near St. Cloud, Minnesota. His father, numerous relatives, and various family friends were into ice fishing. The old kind of ice fishing, loaded with limitations. You had to love it to put up with the problems associated with making even one hole in the ice.
His dad loved it, and went essentially every day all winter. That was the role model for young Dave, and for the sake of adventure, he went along regularly from the time he was big enough to walk on the ice.
When you hear the story of the modern ice fishing revolution, you come to see that it wasn’t a fast-paced overthrow of the old ways. Rather, it was a matter of Dave and his family happily latching on to every improvement as it either came along or they came up with it. They were fired up about going ice fishing even without any of the gear we now take for granted, so incremental advancements just made them like it more.
Over time, very gradually, Dave put together the pieces and made major breakthroughs of his own. The Winter Fishing System, as we know it now, continues to advance, but here is the story of how we got to this point.
“Well,” begins Dave, “I can remember the beginning of ice fishing (for him) was Mille Lacs Lake, because that’s where my dad went every day. He ice-fished every day. He’d leave at noon one day, and come home around noon the next. So how could Mom get mad? He was home every day.
“He actually did that. He’d go 30 days in a row. He’d get up every morning, do the honey-dos that needed to be done around the house – shovel coal into the furnace, shovel the driveway, whatever it was – and then him and my uncle would jump into the company pickup, or the old straight-8 Buick. We’re talking about the 50s, which is what I can remember. I’m sure they were doing this before I could remember.
“And they’d drive up to Mille Lacs.”
Tell us more about what a typical day on the ice would have been for your dad back then, so we get a sense of what stage the sport was in.
Dave: We lived near St. Cloud, so it was a little better than an hour up to Garrison, or Onamia. That’s the end of the lake they usually fished.
They’d go out on the lake, to the big fish house that we had. It was a wheeled fish house, meaning that it was an old trailer house they had converted into a fish house. It wasn’t quite as modern as the wheeled fish houses are now. You had to jack it up, take the tires off, then let it back down. And you’d take a chisel and chop out where the axles laid into the ice.
You’d chop around, get the thing to sit level, and block up the corners. When it was time to move it, you could jack it up and get the wheels underneath of it and pull it down the highway.
We fished all sides of the lake. We didn’t just fish over by Indian Point. If the rumor was the bite was at Malmo, they’d hook up and drag the house around the lake to the other side.
So that’s what I remember. They would go to that wheeled fish house and fire up the oil stove. Then they would leave and go fishing. They had portable fish houses – one that looked like the Fish Trap and the other was a 4-by-4 house that set up easily and quickly. It didn’t even collapse; it was just 4-by-4.
They’d go to wherever the resort owner had plowed the new road to. They’d go set up there and it was nothing fancy. Chop a hole and fish until dark. You might chop a couple holes and go find where it dropped off. Or there’d be six or eight fish houses there from the resort, and you’d go check the holes in the fish houses, to see where the dropoff was.
You’d get set up and fish there until dark, or after, and usually catch a couple walleyes in that process. And then they’d go back to the wheeled fish house and make something to eat. The house was nice and warm by then, and they’d play a couple games of cribbage, put lines down in the fish house and go to sleep.
They’d get up early the next morning, pack everything up in the fish house, turn the heater off, go back to what they’d learned the night before, get set up – this is all before daylight – and then fish until about 10 o’clock in the morning. They’d catch a few more walleyes, pack up and drive home. They’d be home by noon, so then you’re back to doing your honey-dos or whatever needed to be done.
So he’d do this, or something similar, pretty much every day?
Dave: Yeah, he repeated that the next day. Except on the weekend. Then they might even stay up there for the whole weekend. On the weekends, they were joined by other people who had regular jobs. My dad was a road construction worker, and when I grew up he didn’t work during the winter time; he would draw unemployment. He got 26 dollars a week unemployment, and my uncle used to joke that he spent 25 dollars on minnows (laughs). But, he obviously did a good job of saving money through the summer, so they survived the winter quite well, and we ate a lot of fish.