March ice on Rėkyva and the morning I turned round at the shore

01What the log says

Sunday 10 March 2024. Left the flat at 05:50 and was on the shore of the south bay by 06:40. Air plus two, overnight minus three, no wind, a low grey sky. Ice by the tape in my first hole, three metres out from the reeds: eighteen centimetres. On paper that is plenty. I have walked on less in January without a second thought, and a man I did not know was already sitting on a bucket perhaps two hundred metres out.

The drill cuttings told a different story. They came up grey and granular, like wet sugar, instead of the clean white chips that January ice gives. The walls of the hole showed long vertical crystals, each one loose from its neighbours, and when I pushed the spud into the side wall it crumbled away in pencils. That is candled ice, and eighteen centimetres of it is not eighteen centimetres of anything I would trust.

02Why March ice lies

Ice is strongest when it has frozen from clear water in hard cold and stayed that way. By March the sun is high enough to matter, days climb above zero, and meltwater works down between the crystals. The sheet stays thick but loses the bonds that hold it together. It can carry a person one morning and let a leg through the next without getting much thinner in between. A tape measures thickness; it cannot measure how well the ice is holding together.

Rėkyva makes this worse in its own way. The lake is big and shallow, its water is brown from the bog to the south, and dark water under thinning ice soaks up the sun's warmth readily. The reed margins go first, because the stems carry warmth down into the ice and the rotting plants underneath give off gas and heat. By the second week of March there is often a ring of soft grey ice or open water between the shore and the solid sheet, and that ring is exactly where you have to walk.

03Signs that count for more than centimetres

Any one of the signs listed below sends me home in March, however good the fishing was the day before. On that Sunday there were four of them: the grey cuttings, candles in the hole wall, a soft ring along the reeds that the spud went through on the second strike, and water standing in the footprints of whoever had walked out before me. I wrote all four into the log before I had even taken a rod out of the sled.

I did not go out. I stood on the shore with a flask of tea for half an hour, watched the man on the bucket, who was fine and went home with a bag of perch, and wrote the page you are reading. The following Saturday the south bay was open water from the reeds to well past the spot where he had sat. Being right about ice is no pleasure at all; it only means the careful choice was the right one that week.

• Grey, dark or blotchy ice instead of clear black or even white.
• Water lying on top of the ice, or slush hiding under the snow.
• A band of open water or soft ice along the shore and the reeds.
• Drill cuttings like wet sugar, and long loose crystals in the hole wall.
• The spud goes in deep, or straight through, in one or two blows.
• Rain on the ice in the last few days, or nights that no longer freeze.

04Rules for the last ice, and what to do if it goes

In late season I go out only after a night of real frost, I am off the ice before the sun is high, I never go alone, and I never cross a soft ring at the shore, whatever the ice beyond it looks like. Once rain has fallen on the ice, or the nights stop freezing, my season is over, however well the perch are biting. The fish will still be there in December, and so, with any luck, will I.

If the ice does give, the first minute is about breathing, not climbing. The shock of cold water makes you gasp and pant, and that passes within a minute or so if you keep your head up and let it. Then turn back towards the way you came, because that ice held you. Get your arms onto it, dig in with the ice claws hanging round your neck, kick your legs up behind you until you are lying flat, and slide out. Roll away from the hole, do not stand, crawl back along your own tracks, and call 112 even if you feel fine.

05What I do in March instead

Giving up the last ice is easier with something else to do. Once my season on the lakes is over, I spend the March weekends re-spooling line, sharpening the auger blades properly on a stone, sorting the jig box, and copying the winter's figures from the pencil notebook into the proper log. It is dull work, and it is the reason the next December starts with a sharp auger and a clear idea of where the perch were.

When the ice has gone completely, usually in April, I walk the southern shore of Rėkyva and look at the bays in open water. The places where the ice rotted first are easy to see then: the inflows, the reed beds, a spring that keeps one patch of water dark and still. I mark them on a printed map that lives in the front of the log, so that next March I know exactly where not to stand.