Prized plastic pickle bucket

The Best of Stubble Mulch

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The plastic pickle bucket is a prized object for those who will soon go out on the ice bent on freezing their weathered wazoos and possibly catching a cold and maybe a fish or two.

You know the bucket I’m talking about ... those five-gallon jobbies once purgatory for dill pickles, dry wall cement and dozens of other products. The buckets are prized and highly sought to morph into catchalls that gimmick-wild ice fisherman will die for.

This preference for plastic pickle buckets may have something to do with the herding instinct ice fisherman have. They like to bunch up out there on the ice forming lonely little huddled communities, seeking solace, warmth and maybe a slug of Cinnamon Schnapps from a neighbor, I suppose.    

Native Americans once equated wealth with the number of horses they owned. Status on a frozen lake is based on the number of white plastic pickle buckets one owns. 

Time was when warm-weather fishing stimulated inventions galore, from pole holder gizmos to unbreakable fishing rods and motorized reels. But lately, merchants have discovered the ice fishermen’s needs. Inventors have come up with more cold weather fish stuff than there are fleas on a hunting dog.

Ice fishermen also like to stick to the old. 

Sure, industry has given them a specially designed, small, downsized fishing stick about the length of a gear shift stick on a ’38 Chrysler. There’s also sonar, which seems so unsportsmanlike. But other than that, what you see on the ice is what you get from scrounging around junkyards, second hand stores, and digging through cardboard boxes at farm sales.

Just as there are no two snowflakes exactly alike, neither are there two ice fishermen with exactly the same equipment. The white plastic pickle bucket is about the only common denominator.

Every fisherman owns at least a half-dozen buckets. Some of the more devoted own herds of them, properly branded and stabled in their barns and garages.

The plastic pickle bucket has a plethora of uses. You’ll see hooded fishermen waddling along out on to the ice like penguins, each carrying gear in plastic buckets. 

At the fishing site, the bucket becomes a stool. If a fish is caught, another becomes a creel. Still another holds lunch, fishing tackle, a tin can full of rusty fish hooks, a hunk of year-old chislic, battle-damaged slip bobbers, a rust-impaired pair of pliers and tinny old Prince Albert tobacco can filled with hunks of mattress stuffing to which cling a variety of maggots, fruit fly larva, wax worms and goldenrod grubs. 

There’s also some extra clothing in the bucket just in case the ice gives way. 

I don’t know what fishermen did before the era of pickle buckets came along to keep their keisters up off the ice, but the plastic pickle bucket has revolutionized modern-day ice fishing. 

White remains the color of choice for plastic pickle buckets, but greens are making inroads as bucket makers see the growing fishing uses of the bucket. Other companies make chair-shaped lids that fit over the tops of the buckets to make the ice fisherman more comfortable as he slowly drifts into bobber shock when the fish aren’t biting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone will soon manufacture a smaller plastic pickle bucket that ice fishermen can use as footstools.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.