Glen Strandberg
Staff Writer

Through the efforts of local anglers Jim Woods and Dan Luger, Forest Lake will once again be the site of a major ice-fishing competition. This one will be called the Fishapalooza Ice Fishing Contest.

That’s as long as the date of Saturday, Feb. 16 gets the approval of a certain female.

“Good old Mother Nature — she gets last call,” founder and organizer Woods said.

Since 1987, Forest Lake hosted the Golden Rainbow Ice Fishing Contest, where as many as 10,000 anglers would make up one of the largest ice-fishing contests in the country.

In recent years, the event was sponsored by the Hopkins Area Jaycees as a fundraiser, but since 2002, warm winters and unsafe ice caused the contest to be cancelled four times.

During the winter of 2006-07, the threat of thin ice forced the Jaycees to announce that the Golden Rainbow would move to Grand Rapids in 2008 in hopes of finding colder temperatures. But eventually the organizers had to admit they couldn’t make it work financially.

Around that same time, in December of last year, Woods and Luger were sitting in an ice house, when they thought of keeping an ice-fishing contest in Forest Lake.

Then they needed to figure out how one goes about doing just that.

Woods said he and Luger began by looking at other contests in order to figure out the whole process of planning a major event.

One vital piece to pulling this off was landing a non-profit organization as a sponsor. The two were aware that Forest Lake VFW Post 4210 was involved in the ice-fishing contest years ago, so that’s where they made their first pitch.

Keith Hegstrom, club manager and adjutant for Post 4210, said he spoke with Woods and Luger in March and the members of VFW soon gave their approval.

“We know these guys are go-getters,” Hegstrom said of Woods and Luger.

With the sponsor taken care of, the founders of Fishapalooza started focusing on prizes and donations. Woods admitted that initially it was slow-going as they tried talking ice fishing in the summertime.

But as of early October, when he and Luger made the announcement about Forest Lake’s new ice-fishing contest, the competition and raffles will offer $130,000 in prizes.

With names like Ford, Budweiser, Gander Mountain and KQRS on board, Woods said they encountered nothing but “super people.”

“We couldn’t ask for more help from our sponsors,” he said.

Come back in mid-February and see if Mother Nature is as generous.

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