The other day we went ice fishing with friends in the beach nearby where we live. Every winter the sea (the river and the lakes as well, for that matter) freezes and the beaches get completely covered by ice and snow. I somehow find this very fascinating. As an Alp girl, I tend to associate cold with altitude, and sea with warmth. In Finland though, what’s logical for me goes completely out of the window. Here’s it’s flat, there is the sea + beaches and it is indeed cold. This geographical and meteorological combination is something extremely exotic and unique for me. Now, I’ve never walked on a frozen water surface before. My only knowledge about frozen sea/lake walking was the ones I acquired from movies, that always end up with the ice breaking and consequent people running for their lives and few of them drowning. You can imagine my surprise when, after walking towards the open sea for few hundreds meters and starting to drill a hole in the ice with an ice auger, we realized the ice was still about 60 cm (34 inches) thick!
Meanwhile my friends were fishing, I was of course taking pictures. The wind was strong and, even though it wasn’t too cold, it made it feel way colder. I loved the perspective from there, one otherwise impossible to achieve. It wasn’t slippery because of the snow that had fallen the night before and that was dancing in an enchanting way together with the wind.
The sea and the beach were far from being desert: many other fishermen were there, several kite-skiers and some who were just taking a walk in this almost unreal landscape. As you could expect, in Finnish there is a specific word for this kind of fishing, which is “pilkkiä”. After three frozen fingers we even got a perch.
By the way, you see the sun in the picture? That’s more or less as high as it gets during this season at this latitude. If you are anywhere in the city or in a forest, you won’t see it as it is so low, so being at the sea definitely allowed us to enjoy it to the full 🙂
