6:44 a.m. CAUTION: THIN ICE, PROCEED AT OWN RISK. That’s the sign that greets us at Deer Creek Reservoir. Or that’s what we think it says. We’re too busy staring at the dashboard’s outside-temperature gauge, which reads 1 degree.

6:45 OK, I’m lying. The gauge is 13 degrees off, so it’s 14 degrees. But we’re driving a white Cadillac DeVille and are not feeling particularly tough.

7:03 Joel Marchello and Mike Fisher pull into the lot. In a Ford F-150 truck. Joel and Mike took the day off from Sportsman’s Warehouse in Provo to fish with us. “Is it always this chilly?” I ask Joel. “Glad it warmed up, actually,” he responds.

7:10 Steve and I fill out our one-day fishing licenses, $8.00 each: $7.75, plus a quarter for search-and-rescue.

7:16 We’re staring at snowy Mount Timpanogas, the second to last major bump on the Rockies chain. In its shadow, Mike, who has trekked a hundred yards out, looks like a chocolate sprinkle on a soft-serve vanilla cone. We catch up with him, and watch him position his gas-powered augur upright and pull the starting cord. He powers it through nearly a foot and a half of ice, leaving a 10-inch hole and a gopher mound of shaved ice around it. The reservoir is dotted with these pilings, the remnants of fishing trips past

7:29 Mike and Joel erect a four-man “Speed Shak” over two diagonal holes. Once in place, Mike fires up the propane lamp hanging from the roof. Maybe this isn’t so insane.

7:34 No, it is. The Shak is a prop. After setting it up, Mike and Joel run from it: self-respecting ice fishers do not fish “indoors,” or anywhere near anything loosely defined as such. They were just being nice. Mike drills a hole 50 yards away; Joel pulls his bucket up to one closer. My preconceived notions of this pastime are shattered. It’s one man, one hole. Not the klatch I’d anticipated.

7:48 There’s an ascending blip on the screen of Joel’s Fishfinder 240, a sonar device that tracks perch crawling “tight to the bottom.” Joel gets the blip’s attention by yanking his jig. A few yards atop the jig is the “flasher.” We’re using a Swedish Pimple to catch the fish’s eye. He tells me he works at the Warehouse’s fishing department, a job he got after years as an avid customer. He’s 25, rents a house in Provo and enjoys watching “Ultimate Fighting.”

7:57 “Ultimate Fighting is a sport,” Joel says, his goatee frosted. “It’s the most true sport there is, man. One-on-one competition.”

8:12 Historically, fishing for perch has been looked down upon. “A lot of the old folks give you crap,” Joel says. That’s because reservoirs were overpopulated. Overpopulation leads to smaller fish, and who wants to waste time–got one!

8:13 “Swing and a miss,” says Joel. “He just came up and breathed on it.” The challenge is hooking them. The rods, at 30 inches, allow for quick reeling–too quick for the perch to take. Their air sacs burst, and they get a nasty case of the bends.

8:25 Here’s the thing about ice fishing: you can’t actually fish in the ice. So when your hole freezes, you have to skim off the crystals. I do this using a slotted metal spoon great for boiling penne. Mike–I’ve hiked to his hole–uses his bare hand.

8:33 Chubs, wrapped like chopped sirloin, fill the front end of Mike’s toboggan. There’s an empty bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper and Rolos, too. He cuts some chub with a knife, feeds it on the jig, and drops the blade in the snow. Were this a cartoon, it would go booooiiingggg.

8:47 Mike’s rod doesn’t have the orange spring bobber on it as mine does. I wonder how he knows he’s getting a bite. “I used to focus on an ice crystal,” he says, but he abandoned that. Wasn’t working. Nothing is today.

8:59 Until, of course, I use the facilities. I mention this only because there are none. When I trudge back to Mike’s hole, there’s foot-long, mustard-colored perch twitching. It’s bleeding and the frozen blood looks like red pepper flakes. Filleted and deep fried, “it’s good eats,” Mike says.

9:15 “I like the competition,” Mike says. “Me against the fish.” Mike, 34, the Warehouse’s fishing manager, has three kids and fishes three times a week. He doesn’t enter competitions. People around here don’t. They head to Wyoming where prizes are larger. Utah capped awards at $500 after poaching became a problem. Hunters were shooting sure-money deer off season and freezing them to win Jeeps.

9:19 Mike carves a chunk of neck meat from his perch, and threads it onto my jig. I rest my pole on the spatula to give my spring bobber wiggle room. It wiggles … it’s wiggling! Please, God, don’t let me lose her. I hang on, and jerk a massive beast from the earth. Santiago and Roy Scheider have nothing on me.

9:20 OK, I’m lying. It’s 10 inches and my success is sullied. I apparently hooked her in the cheapest possible way: “on the sit,” with my rod just lying there. I didn’t earn it.

9:34 We’ve been out almost three hours and caught three fish between the four of us. Joel got one, too. Mike rises from his bucket and gives Joel the “two-thumbs down.” Joel echoes the sentiment. We huddle halfway between the two holes.

9:40 “Fish Lake,” says Mike, “there’d be 20 for four.” I take this to mean that, at Fish Lake, there are actually fish in the lake.

9:45 I pull Steve aside. “Hey, Steve,” I ask. “How’re the feet?” “Fine,” he says. “How’re yours?” “OK. You want to keep going?” I ask. “Yeah, we can go,” Steve says. I allow for this misunderstanding since I cannot feel my heels, let alone my toes.

9:46 Sprint to the DeVille.