Dan and Bruce's Great Fishing Adventure:

I was working in Jacksonville, Fla. and stopped at a small fishing shack along a creek. I was looking for directions to a witness I had been looking for. It was early morning and as the man was giving me directions a boat pulled up and had us come over to look at the fish he had caught. He had half a dozen largemouth bass in his live well and all were 4-5 pounds or more. I ask him what he was using for bait and he said dry ice. 

 He used a small tobacco sack, and he run his line through it with a little weight on it and tied a treble hook on it and said he put a piece of dry ice in the sack and just threw it out and let it sit on the bottom. He said the bubbles drove the fish crazy and they would pick it up to move it. When he felt it move he would set the hook. He told me it seemed to work best at night. 

Those sure were a good-looking bunch of bass and his technique sounded just crazy enough to possibly work. Besides I had just read an article in an outdoor magazine about using Alka Seltzer in a similar way. 

I gave my fishing buddy Dan a call and told him about it and he said he had some little bags at work, and he would grab a couple. I told him I would buy some dry ice. He would hook up his aluminum flat bottom boat and pick me up just before dark. We launched after dark and drifted down the creek tossing the unusual rig into every good-looking spot we saw. 

When I would chip the dry ice small chunks would fly off and hit the bottom of his boat and make a zinging sound as they skipped around the boat. We fished for about 5 hours with nothing resembling a bite but cooled the water temperature with 5 pounds of dry ice considerably.  Sometime around 2 AM, after several hours of silence I said, "I think we have been fooled like a fishing type of snipe hunt", and Dan agreed so we headed back to the launch ramp before the shack owner came in. 

Now it is funny but back then it wasn't that funny as we both had to go to work with only a couple hours of sleep. That trip was about as funny as the time we ran up on an underwater stump and stuck the boat right in middle. All we could do is go in circles around that stump trying to get free, - in a snake infested creek. But that is another story for another time.