“How’s your schedule looking next week?” I typed to my buddy Sam. “I think we’re going to get a hatch by Sunday.”
He replied quickly: “Hatch? It’s February and it’s freezing.”
“Exactly,” I answered. “It’s the rarest of hatches here in Virginia: fishable ice.”
Ice fishing is an annual pastime for our friends up North. Here in the Southeast, it is a rare and fleeting thing. I hadn’t ice fished in Virginia since 2015.
I’m not complaining that I get to target trout in moving water year ‘round here in the mid-Atlantic. But when we do get the rare hard water hatch, it’s a “fun break from our regularly scheduled programming,” as a friend recently put it.
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