My name is Ken Eastman at Wildlife Habitat Consultants. Today, we are going to talk about ice fishing shelters. As you can see in the background here, there are all kinds of different shapes and sizes on them out there. These out here, as you can see the first one happens to be on a trailer and the others out there further, they are wood, they are called shanties or shacks, whatever you want to call them.
There are different kinds of shelters beside these. You have got a tent shade, and you have got portables that on a sledge. The disadvantages of these out here as you can -- I don't know if you can see it, but behind me you can see the snow conditions out there. You have to maintain these all the time. What I mean by that, out there if you can see it, it's froze up now, but the way to snow and people grilled holes around there, this let the water on the ice. And if you don't keep blocking your shanties up out here, they will freeze right here on the ice and the only way you can chop them out is getting them out.
Some of the other problems you run into it, or if you don't run into it, it will freeze right down in and you won't get it out. The portable ones, they are lot nicer, they are tents. They are nice, but sometimes they don't. They will blow away on you. You can't stick them down enough. Then they have the ones on the sledge, the other portable ones. I like those personally, because I don't have to like -- when I leave, I can take them off. I don't have to worry about them as the weather changes. I don't have to keep running back up for the lake. If we get a bad snow storm or if we get a bad thaw, I don't have to worry about the others.
Another thing is, I don't have to worry about these permanent ones. Somebody to breaking into, which happens. There are pros and cons of all of them. As you can see I prefer these type of shanty, a portable shanty, and as you saw me dragging it down through it here, and see we drag it down through. I can pretty much pull it with one finger. The silicon at the bottom, that makes it more slipper here.
Also, we have a cover on it and that keeps the snow out of it, and it's more versatile. I can move this type of shanty, I can set it part way up as a windbreaker or I can pull it all the way and I can have a heater inside of it. And at the end of the day, I take it home. I don't have to worry about it being frozen to the ground in the ice. There are lots of pros and cons with it. What comes the worth of is the plastic sledge, it keeps you out of the water, if you need to.
There is more advantages to a portable, nowadays. We didn't have them years ago. That's what we all had the wood shanties, but now with the portable shanties, you can put behind an ATV, they have stiff edges for them. You can put them behind the snow machine, you can pull them by a truck, you can load them in your truck. There are different ways, different ways to haul them out there and like I said, they go from single men shanties now, these portables to, 6, 8, and 10 people. So they got more various use for them.
One nice thing about this folks, this door opens up, and you can roll this back. You got Velcros right back in here, so drag it out to your way. If you have a door, or you can be lazy like I like to be, sit right down or it flip right up over you and you can use it as a windbreak, whichever way you want.
So that's the one nice feature about it. If it goes, we will flip it back down. Now we have gone to shelters a little bit, very basic. Let's talk about ice safety.
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