The lady likes the lure of Ice fishing

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The lady likes the lure of Ice fishing

by Ed Coulhane / Post Cresent News



Neenah, WI - I'd heard about her long before I met her — the no-holds barred lady fisherman from Neenah who lives on the ice.

She gets her husband off to work, her two daughters off to school, then jumps in her truck, following the bus down the street until she can break free, a hunter of fish, aiming herself like a weapon onto frozen water.

By her own estimate, Kim Thiesen fishes 200 days a year. It'd be more, but the husband and daughters slow her down some in the summer.

"Doc" Van Lieshout of Appleton recalls the first time he saw her, pulling a sled full of gear onto the lake ice. It was four or five years ago. Lieshout, 78, had never seen a woman alone on the ice before. He figured something was wrong, that maybe she was trying to find someone.

"Do you have a problem?" he asked her.

She regarded him a moment, then gave him a friendly smile.

"No," she said. "No problem. Everything's fine."

Later, when he saw her again on another lake, the retired physician introduced himself, confessed to his misplaced chauvinism, and they both had a good laugh. Now Van Lieshout and his buddies keep in regular contact with her, sharing intelligence about lake conditions and fish activity.

"I see her out there drilling holes for people," he said. "She's a real class person. Everyone who fishes around Boom Bay knows her. She usually catches more bluegills than we do.

"I hope she didn't tell you that," he added. "I have a reputation to maintain."


The near shore ice on Lake Poygan was soft Thursday morning, some of it underwater.

The state Department of Natural Resources had just issued a public warning, saying two weeks of warm, wet weather had caused lake ice to deteriorate statewide, making it both deceptive and dangerous. Here at Boom Bay, the ice at the landing was a mess, all busted up. Two young guys in a truck broke through the other day, dropping two tires before grinding their way free in reverse.

There were a dozen shacks on the lake, clustered a half mile off shore. Thiesen and her fishing partner that day, Ron Ebben of Menasha, were off on their own, at least another quarter mile out, with only herring gulls for company. The ice was mottled, white in places, soft and gray in others. My boots sometimes broke through the surface crust, dropping through six inches of water before hitting ice again.

The fishing has been slow. Most folks blame the warm, wet Pacific air that's hit the area with a series of rainstorms, trashing December's snows and clouding the water below the ice. There's been no sun for two weeks, not enough solar energy to energize the microscopic plankton, to get things moving under the ice.

"It's been tough," Thiesen said, after introductions. "I thought last year was bad, but this is worse. The weather has just been awful. There's all this runoff coming into the lakes. There's current everywhere, which is unusual."


I didn't bother to ask why she kept at it. Tough fishing is still fishing, and Thiesen is a fisherman's fisherman. She fishes hard. She never learned about giving up. She keeps drilling holes till she finds fish, and when she does, she has the finesse to hook them. She fishes almost exclusively with artificial lures. Like a lot of men I've met ice fishing, she doesn't wear gloves.


"I'd do it every day if I could," she said, "but you have to be a mom sometimes."

As a parent myself, I empathized.

A half hour into our conversation she moved further out on the ice, and when I gave her a short break from questions, she closed her clamshell-style tent to block the wind and shade the fishing hole so she could see below the ice. A gentler, slower presentation made a difference, and ten minutes later she had four fat bluegills flopping in the bucket.

She didn't fall into this midlife. She was born in northern Illinois, the third of Bob and Dorothy Kohut's four children, and she was fishing by the time she was 5. Her dad even took her on the ice. They moved to Waupaca when she was 8, lived on Otter Lake. She'd take the rowboat out and hook bass and northern pike that were 40 inches long.

Before she was out of high school, in the mid 1970s, she became one of the founding members of the Waupaca Bass Club, joining forces with others who were just like her, only they happened to be adults and men.

"We were always competitive, and we lived to fish, so we figured, 'Why not have a contest?' "

At the time, the national bass fishing contests were restricted to men.

"It was tough back then for a woman," she said. "You weren't really appreciated."

She was studying commercial art at the Milwaukee Technical College when she fell for Henry Thiesen and got married. They moved to Waupaca, rented on the Columbia. She'd fish for an hour in the morning before going to work at the weekly newspaper. In 1982 they moved to New London where her husband had a job with Curwood. She worked at a sport shop but stopped in 1985 when her first daughter, Michelle, was born. Her daughter, Jamie, followed in 1988, surviving a difficult birth and coming into the world with special needs.

"The only time I got to go fishing was on weekends when my husband was home from work."

Once the girls went to school, she was out the door, fishing gear in the back of the truck. Her husband stayed on the job, rising to the position of chief operating officer at the packaging company, now called Beemis. He likes to fish too, but is limited mostly to vacations.

"Somebody's got to work to pay for all my fishing equipment," she pointed out.

I asked her to explain her passion for fishing, as if speaking to someone who knew nothing about it.

"It's like reading a good book," she said. "I just can't put it down. I'm like a kid. I still get really excited. I can't wait to get out here."


I was reminded of another story Van Lieshout had told me about her. It was two years ago, in the winter, and Thiesen had hooked up with Van Lieshout and his two regular partners. The fishing was miserable and they stayed on the move, all morning and into the afternoon, working in pairs, leapfrogging onto new ice to drill new holes.

Van Lieshout likes to quit around 2:30 or 3 p.m. so he can be home ahead of a 5 p.m. dinner, so his steak won't get cold. The others were done too. Van Thiesen joined the chorus, said she'd leave with them. At the landing, however, they ran into a guy just pulling his sled out. He told them the fish had started biting late the day before, after 3:30.

After seven or eight hours of hard fishing, the three men shrugged and kept walking, but not Thiesen. So they turned to check on her. She looked at them, at the lake and then at them again.

"I guess I can be late for dinner," she said, heading back onto the ice alone. "I'll see you guys later."