30 NEBRASKAland • DECEMBER 2018
tournament Calcutta the night before
was gone. With head pounding, Don
starting eating ice from the holes they
had cut as they watched a team near
them haul in fish after fish.
They didn't catch a single one.
Red Man
After the tournament, Don and Dave
talked to some guys who had fished
Pelican Lake that same day. "When
they showed us their bluegills, I had
no idea what I was looking at," said
Don. "It wasn't until I was at my son's
doctor's appointment a couple weeks
later that something clicked."
There was an In-Fisherman Magazine
photograph of a guy holding a 10-inch
bluegill. "I just remember how happy
he looked," Don said. Then he thought
back to the fish from Pelican not two
weeks before. "There was not a bluegill
close to that small."
By that Sunday he and Dave were
pulling into Pelican, but they weren't
alone. "There had to be more than
600 people fishing," he said. "Finding
a parking spot wasn't easy. It was a
quarter-mile walk to get to the ice."
They set up near a man whose area
was dotted with Red Man chewing
tobacco excretions, and watched him
catch three of the largest bluegill that
Don has ever seen. "He was obviously
having a good day," Don noted. "There
was a 25 mile-per-hour wind and
neither one of his two 5-gallon buckets
where he was throwing fish moved at
all."
While Red Man never shared his
tackle and techniques – the man only
glared and grunted at them – Don and
Dave made a pact that day to get better
at ice-fishing. They even set personal
Don is all smiles while ice-fishing at Pelican Lake on the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge.
