Hover-Skating on Coralville Lake
By Michael Courtney
It was a long tiresome week at work with a couple of days working 10 and 12 hrs. One Monday everything went smooth. I got a call from my brother that he was getting Cable on Wednesday for Internet and wanted me to come over and help him with setting up his cable modem.
It just so happen that on Wednesday the computer an employee was using crashed and he had to leave the next day for Florida. He works out of Desmoines, IA and drove 120 miles to Cedar Rapids to get it fixed. He did not get here until after 3:00 pm, A standard OS was put on and then we had to install another 7 software Apps. All the software was loaded and he was ready to leave except that I wanted him to test his Diaup connection since he would not be connected from our LAN. He could not do it and I spent 2 hrs getting it fixed. It was 10:00 pm when I left work. I also had anther day that I did not leave until 8:00 pm.
Thursday night I went over to my brother's
and found out he had a corrupt OS "ME" alias Multiple
Errors or Millenium. Worked until 10:00 pm trying to get it to
work and finally told John he was going to need a new Hard drive.
On Friday evening I went back to John's place and put in the new
hard drive and after jumping through a few hoops was able to load
Windows 2000 OS. I got home at 10:30 pm.
On Saturday morning I was up at 6:00 am to
get an early jump on the day to do my weekend chores. Bye
11:30 am I was set to go Hovering. But where should I go?
The Mississippi? No too far. The
Cedar River? A possibility since it was frozen over. Naaa,
I wanted someplace I had never Hovered before.
It is a lake of over 4000 acres and I think
maybe more. I hovered from the Dam "west" to
Green Castle Bridge where the Iowa river feeds into the lake.
It is approximately 18 miles one way.
I did manage to get up to 49 mph over the ice with the enclosure.
The ice was really smooth with on a few pressure ice ridges to
watch out for.
It was great to be the only one on the lake except for a couple
of Snowmobiles and Four Wheelers. I guess it was okay as there
seemed to be about 15 inches of ice everywhere.
One my way west I would see Icefisherman but did not stop as I
wanted to hover the whole length of the Lake. On my return
trip I stopped to see how a group of icefisherman were doing. To
my surprise these guys were not your average ice fisherman.
They were fisherman and they were fishing but in a different way.
They were huddled over a 2 foot by 2 foot sqaure hole in the ice
pulling up a net. It had Carp and Buffaloe in it with a few
weighing in the vicinity of 15 lbs each.
They were Commercial Fisherman and let me take pics and ask questions on how they fished for Rough fish through the ice. What it was is that they had cut a channel approximately a foot wide about 100 yards long and strung a Trammel Net and placed the net in below the ice. When they came back to check the net it was frozen to the ice and they had to cut square holes and pull the net to unloosen it.
They also picked up quite a few fish. They
had burlapp bags full of Buffaloe and Carp. I estimate they
had about 200 lbs of fish in each bag and I saw at least 5 bag
fulls of fish.
At 4:30 pm, I headed for the boat ramp.
It was a great day and a good way to relax.Mike C "Mag Master"
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