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Unbelievable, But True! Fishing Stories of Twin Pines Resort

Fishing for Eye Glasses - The Recovery Story, for the record:

By Al “The Lightweight” Hillmann
2/4/13 10:01 AM

You might wonder what a person would do if his $600 Eye Glasses accidentally fell through one of the ice fishing holes in your fish house. This just happened on Thursday night at Twin Pines Resort, and there was NO alcohol involved, I assure you. Phil “The Flopper” Foss is a witness to that.

Of course glasses don’t want to fall straight down from where they go in, so by lowering a minnow scooper down an adjacent hole and seeing it on the underwater camera we rented for $16 per day (Two days: Friday is one day and Saturday is another day), we were able to calculate which direction the glasses drifted out to by rotating the camera 360 degrees and use our H.S. geometry class skills to make a good guess.

Guessing the distance from the hole was also a challenge. We could see them with the camera from the hole they went down, but it’s hard to judge how far away they were. Fortunately, they drifted about 3.5 feet away from the house. If they would have drifted towards the inside of the house we would have been screwed, unless we could get Twin Pines to move the house, which would never happen.

So, we had two holes drilled outside the house by Billy “The Driller” Bob, and knowing that we were above the glasses by lowering the camera down those holes, put us in a “recovery zone”. Chris “The Chopper” Stark formed the elongated hole which would allow us to do our “puppeteering”.

We then fabricated a weight/balanced (wood handle end wanted to float) Gaff hook with two lines on it (one on each end) and distance markers every five feet or so on each line so we could keep the gaff horizontal while we lowered it. Within 10 minutes, we had hooked the OGA glasses through a small square temple hole near the hinge, which couldn’t have been a better spot.

Our biggest fear was that we would hook them and then on the way up the current or bottom of the ice hole could have knocked them off. They were NOT coming off where they were hooked. And by bringing them up handle first, we could grab the handle when it got up to the top and make sure we were coming up exactly in the center. And just for the record, Billy Bob said, after drilling our holes, that he has NEVER seen anyone recover anything from the bottom of the lake. And another amazing fact…Not a scratch on them.