A fishing trip with a catch
Doug Smith, Star Tribune
LAKE MILLE LACS – Jeremy Pfaffendorf was content inside his toasty ice fishing house last Thursday while a brisk wind blew across snow-covered and frozen Lake Mille Lacs. Things were looking good for the 32-year-old construction worker from Forest Lake. He had already caught and released a big walleye. And two buddies were coming later to join him for a weekend on the ice. Then came the knock on his door. It wasn’t a conservation officer. Or a fellow angler from the dozens of other nearby shacks. Or his boss, his girlfriend or a bill collector. It was a television crew from ESPN2’s “Wanna’ Go Fishing?” show. They stuck a microphone and cameras in his face and fired him ques! tions. How’s the fishing? What are you fishing for? What are your plans this weekend?
Then host Matt Eastman popped the question:
“What would you say if I asked you to go to the Florida Keys fishing with me for the weekend? Everything on us.”
Pfaffendorf, standing in his doorway, looked as if he had been hit in the forehead with a frozen fish.
“I’d say that’s crazy,” he sputtered. “No way. Is this for real?”
“We’re serious,” Eastman said, grinning.
The catch? The show, which premiered last month, gives contestants just five minutes and two phone calls to agree to drop everything, pack a few things and wing-off to a dream fishing trip.
Call it reality TV meets fishing.
“Are you joking with me?” Pfaffendorf asked again. “This is crazy. Yeah, I’ll go. I just have to call my buddies and tell them not to come up.”
Pfaffendorf, still standing at the doorway of his ice fishing house, dialed one with his cell phone as the cameras rolled, then turned his speaker phone on so they could hear the response.
“Hey man, don’t come up. I’m going to the Florida Keys this weekend sailfishing with ESPN,” he said.
We can’t print his buddy’s pointed words of disbelief.
“This is absolutely crazy,” Pfaffendorf repeated.
About 24 hours later, Pfaffendorf stepped out of a plane and into 80-degree temperatures in Miami. Clad in T-shirt and shorts, he was fishing on the ocean the next morning.
Not going wasn’t an option
Finding someone willing to go on a dream fishing trip isn’t difficult. It’s finding someone able to drop everything and go spur-of-the-moment that can be difficult, said Jeff Lubsen, a producer and cameraman for the show.
Pfaffendorf was a perfect candidate. He does concrete block and brick work, and winter is his slow time. He worked just a couple days last week. And he’s divorced and has no kids.
“I fish a lot,” he said.
His biggest problem: finding someone to watch Lincoln, his miniature dachshund, who was along with him on Mille Lacs.
“I’ll find someone to watch him, don’t worry about that,” he told Eastman as the little dog scampered to greet the visitors.
“We’re going fishing to the Florida Keys!” Eastman shouted.
A giddy Pfaffendorf packed up his fishing gear, raised his ice fishing house onto its wheels, and towed it off the lake and home to Forest Lake. The camera crew followed him to his house as he packed some gear, then the group went to a hotel in Bloomington near the airport.
They flew to Miami on Friday morning.
A fishing dream-come-true
Pfaffendorf and the TV crew drove from Miami to Islamorado on the Florida Keys, where they stayed at a resort and fished the ocean Saturday and Sunday.
Each morning, the captain of the 52-foot charter boat took Pfaffendorf out to catch baitfish — speedos, blue runners and ballyhoo –that he’d use as bait for larger fish.
But some of those baitfish are larger than the perch he usually catches on Mille Lacs.
“The biggest ones were a pound or two.” Pfaffendorf said Monday shortly after arriving home. “It was a lot of fun. We caught them on ultra-light tackle, and it was one right after another. There’s fish everywhere, and you can see them down in the water, which was crystal clear.”
Then they fished for sailfish, shark, barracuda, amberjack or anything else that would bite.
“I caught blackfin tuna like crazy,” he said. “I had three on at one time. They ranged from 5 to 10 pounds. We probably could have caught a hundred of them if we wanted to just fish for those. They were on the surface jumping out of the water like crazy.”
He caught a 60-pound amberjack — the largest fish of the trip — a 4-foot barracuda, king mackerel and more.
“I ended up catching 10 different species. We caught a lot of fish.”
The sailfish proved elusive.
“The sailfish definitely would have been the icing on the cake, but that’s fishing, you know? They just weren’t hitting. We had one jump twice about 20 yards from the boat, though.”
He ate fresh fish, got sunburned had a room with a view of palm trees and a beach — and it didn’t cost him a nickel.
“I kept saying, ‘Is this a dream? Am I really doing this?”‘ he said. “It was, bar none, the best trip I’ve ever been on.”
With about 147,000 ice fishing houses registered in the state, and about 5,000 alone on Lake Mille Lacs, Pfaffendorf said he realizes getting picked for the show was an unbelieveable longshot.
“It was like winning the lottery,” he said.
I think I would have said yes too. Let’s see…one call to the girlfriend and another to school and I’d be set. Very cool idea for a show.
