TIGHT LINES
ICE, ICE BABY
with Andrew Spencer
Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," has been nominated for two Oscars, one for best documentary feature and the other for best original song. So, in a sort of tangential kind of way, Al is now an Oscar nominee.

In the category: Most Likely to be Interpreted as a Sign of the Impending Apocalypse, the winner is Al Gore's Oscar nomination.

Mr. Gore's movie is about that hot-button (no pun intended) issue of global warming, an issue our own Peter Brace has been investigating quite intensively in recent issues of The Nantucket Independent. I myself have a partial solution for global warming that I like to refer to as the "every man for himself" plan. My solution is to make sure I'm never more than six inches away from Peter, as the shadow that a man that tall casts is a long one. I figure I'll let Peter take the hit for me - he's good like that - and I'll stay cool in the shade.

And the winner of the Oscar for Worst Solution to Global Warming is columnist Andrew Spencer.

Global warming is certainly a major problem, and there are quite a few potential issues that we're going to have to face as a result of it. First and foremost, the temperatures of the world - the globe, if you will - will rise, thus making the world - again, the globe, if you will - warmer.

Looks like Andrew Spencer will be taking home two of these babies, as the above statement has garnered him the Oscar for Firm Grasp of the Obvious.

And now, before we get too far off-topic, I just want to point out that warmer is not necessarily a good thing. I know it's cold outside - it's winter, that's kind of the point - and there are a lot of you heading south for a little vacation. And why do you head south? Because it's warmer. But that's a good kind of warmer. With Al Gore's kind of warming, we get ugly things like more intense storms, droughts and melting polar ice caps. And when it's warm enough to melt the polar ice caps, you can bet your backside that it's too warm out to go ice fishing.

And in the most anticipated category of the year, the above paragraph is the runaway winner of the Oscar for Best Segue.

PHOTOS BY JILL SANDOLE Our intrepid writer not only sports fashionable headwear but is a good listener too, as the finer points of Tip-Up handling are pointed out to him. In the bottom photo, a fisherman checks his line.

Friends and neighbors, I grew up in Texas, and about once a year it would get cold enough to actually freeze the surface of this little pond we had at school. And about that time, you could always pick out the new kids, because they were the ones soaking wet as a result of getting dared into walking across the ice. They didn't know it wasn't more than a half-inch thick, and by the time they'd figured it out, it was just a wee-bit late.

Silly Texans, ice has to be at a minimum two inches thick before it's safe for ice fishing, according to the guidelines set out by the Department of Natural Resources. These same people tell me it's safe to drive a "medium pickup truck" on ice that's at least 12 inches thick, which is something you will never-but-NEVER see yours truly trying. But for our purposes here, four-inch-thick ice is the minimum.

I discovered the importance of this fact recently while visiting Jill's parents in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. They live on Lake Quacumquasit, and given the recent temperature drops we've been experiencing, the ice on the lake is, apparently, more than four inches thick. I deduced this after watching multiple snowmobiles and ATVs (which require a five-inch minimum) drive across the lake, and only then did I muster up the courage to walk out on this alien surface and find out what there was to this whole ice fishing thing. And you people thought I never did any real research.

The guys I spoke with were using shiners - live, but very, very cold shiners - which they preferred to using artificial bait. I'm not a huge fan of live bait myself, but if you've got the fortitude to be out there on the ice in sub-zero wind chills, I say knock yourself out if you want to use live bait. You're getting no argument from me.

So anyway, assuming you're fishing with live bait, attach it to a weighted hook with the line attached to a Tip-Up, which serves as an angler's rod, reel and alarm. You can set the line to fish at a specific depth and then the flag at the top of it, which is spring loaded, will flip up when a fish takes the bait. Using Tip-Ups allows you to fish multiple areas and multiple depths, but in the state of Massachusetts, you're only allowed to fish five Tip-Ups per angler.

Having never actually been ice fishing before, I have to admit that, at first glance, it looks like shared misery. It's freezing, the wind is howling, and you're sitting around waiting for a fish to bite. But the more time I spent with these guys, the more I realized it was more than that. It was camaraderie; it was bonding; it was fishing. In a word, it was fun. Now if it'll just get cold enough to freeze four inches around here, we can all go ice fishing and see how much fun it really is.

Actually, you people can all go. I think I'll do some warm-weather research on some beach in Florida. We Texans don't like all this cold.

Tight lines. I