Five-year-old ice-fishing novice lands 5-lb. bass, first try

NORTH CANAAN — At the tender age of 5, Mia Dodge has been bitten by the fishing bug. Mostly she’s done summer fishing. But in her family’s warm and cozy Granite Avenue home last week, she recalled the cold wind on March 3 and her first time ice fishing with her dad, Steve Dodge. She didn’t mind at all holding the fish, since it was a really big one she caught herself. The largemouth bass, estimated at more than 5 pounds, was pulled through a hole in the ice at the westerly end of the Twin Lakes in Salisbury. Her dad helped, of course, but only after Mia made a tremendous effort to hold onto the big guy.Mia’s big adventure started the day before, when Dodge took her and friend Katie Crane to the lake to check the ice.“It was the first time this winter I thought about ice fishing,” he said. “The ice was solid and the girls really wanted to fish. When we went back on Sunday, Mia knew exactly where she wanted the hole drilled.”Mia waited patiently for the auger to breach about 10 inches of ice, and for dad to bait her hook.“You drop a line in and wait for a flag to pop up. It pops up when a fish is there,” Mia said. She offers a cute look of disgust when asked what she uses for bait. “We have a bucket of little fish. I use a little net to scoop them out,” Mia said. On her first ice-fishing outing, she didn’t have to wait long for a fish to come up for a nibble.“The flag went up. I pulled it in and the fish took it right out of my hands. It went on the ground and I hurried and picked it up,” she said. “It was too slippery to hold the line with my gloves on, so I took them off.”Now, to get a true picture of those crazy few minutes, one needs to know that Mia weighs less than 40 pounds, and was screaming the whole time she was battling that fish.After a photo, and a promise that she would be back to catch him again next winter, Mia let him back into the lake.“Later on, we built a fire on the shore and had dinner, but Mia stayed out on the ice, waiting for that flag to pop up again,” Dodge said.Coincidentally, in the house next door, Colleen McKay grew up — and went on to become a college professor and a successful competitor in bass-fishing tournaments. (Must be something in the water!)It got Mia thinking about what she wants to be when she grows up. She likes gymnastics, skating and basketball, and wants to start playing T-ball. But those are things for now. She sees fishing in her future, and decided there were two things she wants to be: a teacher and, after a pause, “Everything!”