BOWDOINHAM (NEWS CENTER Maine)-- Jim's Camps has had a good run this winter, opening by December 28th, 2017 thanks to a cold snap that quickly formed the thick layer of ice needed to set up ice fishing shacks on the Cathance River. Now, with warm temperatures as high as 65 degrees predicted in the coming days, owner Jim McPherson had to make the call to pull the shacks from the ice on Presidents' Day, canceling all reservations for the holiday and the rest of school vacation week.
McPherson says pulling the fishing shacks will mean closing for the season. While safety is a big reason for doing this, McPherson says he has to push and pull the shacks through a swamp area to get them back to their storage location- not something he can easily do once the ground starts to soften and become muddy.
At this point in the season, McPherson noticed not as many smelt were being caught and this factored into why he made the decision to pull the shacks off the ice instead of canceling reservations during the warm spell and waiting until a refreeze.
"If the fish were biting, I probably would have stayed on and just worked a little harder to get them off," McPherson said. "But where the fish aren't biting, and they haven't been biting for a while, it was time to pull them."