Jan. 25, 1925 –
     To harbor sketching – a mild thaw day – at Mich St. Bridge while looking at group of boats an old man came up and “passed the time of day.”  A few encouraging questions on my part and he told me quite a little of the fisherman’s lives.  The ice, he said sometimes is 5 ft. thick and takes a couple days to cut their holes thru.  The holes are about as big as a dinner plate and unless they keep breaking them every other day they soon freeze over again.  Lake herring is the best fish they catch and one winter he made an agreement with a restaurant owner to buy all he caught.  He bought 22 that season.  In the spring all the ice becomes “honey combed” by the sun and is covered with slush and water and that sometimes he is wading in slush almost up to his hips.   This seemed risky to me but he said not.  Sometimes he caught gulls by baiting the hook with a minnow and covering the line with slush.  On one occasion he took the gull home and clipped its wings and kept it as a pet. “But I had to get rid of it because it killed all the roosters around.”  He had a good game rooster that took the gull just 3 minutes to kill.  The gull would pull whole hunks of flesh out at one stroke. An acquaintance brought his rooster over and wanted to put him in the pit with the gull.