Ohio Ice Fishing

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About this site

What this site is, and isn’t

It is a set of quotes from government agencies, park districts and a university extension service, arranged so an angler can find the rule, the access site or the warning quickly. It isn’t a fishing report or an ice report. Nobody here has been out on the ice for you, and we don’t publish anyone’s word that ice will hold.

Method

Every sentence that states a fact about a water, a rule, a fish or ice is a quote, shown in quotation marks with a link to where it came from. Before each update a script fetches every source again, with a User-Agent that names this site, and checks each quote word for word. A source that doesn’t load counts as unverified, and anything unverified comes off the site. The last full check was November 11, 2026.

Our own sentences connect the quotes. As a backstop, the build runs a word filter over them: it stops on a list of phrases that claim ice will hold, and on any measurement in inches outside a quote. A second list holds every quote that contains a measurement or a word like “safe”, each with the reason it was accepted; a new one stops the build until someone reviews it. A filter catches careless edits. It doesn’t replace reading the page, and it can’t judge whether a quote is fairly used.

The freeze tracker is different: your browser asks the National Weather Service for air temperatures when the page loads and does the sums described on that page. We don’t see those requests. Its station names, positions and forecast grids are checked against the Weather Service by the same script that checks the quotes.

Ohio DNR’s web pages refuse automated checks, so most ODNR facts here come from ODNR’s PDF publications and from codes.ohio.gov, which the script can fetch. The state park pages are the exception. They were read in a web browser on November 11, 2026, one ordinary page view per park, and each sentence we quote from them was matched on the page at that time and recorded with its address and date. The script can’t repeat that reading, so we give it a shelf life: 45 days, through December 26, 2026. After that date the pages hide those passages in your browser and show a notice in their place, and the next build of the site removes them, along with the six lake pages built on them, unless the park pages have been read again. With JavaScript off the passages stay on a page already published, so each one carries a line with its read date and the date not to rely on it after. Quotes from those pages are marked “read in a browser” with the date.

Sources

Photos and fonts

All photos are public domain, copied from Wikimedia Commons: Lisa Hupp, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Petty Officer 2nd Class Levi Read, U.S. Coast Guard; Douglas Colwell, U.S. Coast Guard; MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Bain News Service, Library of Congress; State of New York Forest, Fish, and Game Commission, via the University of Washington’s Freshwater and Marine Image Bank; L. W. Brown, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fisheries. Each caption says where and when the record places it. The two Coast Guard photos are of a training exercise on Lake Erie at Marblehead; none of the photos shows current ice anywhere.

Fonts: Saira Stencil One and Literata, under the SIL Open Font License (notice, notice).

Corrections

Spot a mistake, or a quote that’s changed at the source? Email hello@ohioicefishing.com with the page and a link to the correct information. We fix verified errors and never charge for a listing or a correction. We can’t take ice reports.

Who makes this

Ohio Ice Fishing is published by North Coast AI LLC in Ohio. It was built with AI assistance and reviewed by Bill Burkey. It isn’t affiliated with Ohio DNR, the Coast Guard, NOAA, the National Weather Service or any park district.

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