DIXFIELD — Bob Riley loves ice fishing so much that he built a unique fishing shack late last year and parked it on Roxbury Pond in Roxbury.
It’s the Dixfield garage and towing service owner’s favorite place to fish with his brother-in-law, Bub Desroches of Dixfield, though neither eats what they catch.
Riley, a former long-distance trucker who now tows and services trucks at his M/T Pockets garage off Route 2, and Desroches stripped out a 1996 Freightliner tractor-trailer truck cab that he got from a Skowhegan rollover last year.
They loaded the 2,500-pound cab on a trailer and drove to Roxbury Pond to unload it on Jan. 1. The ice was thick enough to hold the novelty fishing shack. They used Riley’s four-wheelers side-by-side to pull it across the ice to French Island and parked it just off shore.
Within 30 minutes, Dennis Daniel, a Roxbury Pond village resident who owns and operates Ellis Pond Variety there, began getting calls from concerned people. They told him some fool had parked a tractor-trailer truck on the pond and believed it was sinking through the ice because they couldn’t see its wheels.
But Riley had removed the wheels and just about everything other than one leather bunk from the white cab shack he dubbed “Haulin’ Bass.”
“I had that cab last year, but I just never got to doing anything with it,” he said. “This fall, we stripped it all out and cleaned everything out inside of it, and I decided to bring it out this year and try it. It’s worked out pretty good.”
After getting the cab and selling all the parts off it, they removed the frame.
“We put some wood 6-by-6s underneath and some plastic skis on it, stripped the inside and that was it,” Riley said.
It took a weekend to strip the cab out. “Wasn’t like it was a really big deal,” he said.
“The outside is exactly the way it was other than I put reflective stickers all over it, only because it’s white and I didn’t want somebody running into it out there on their snowmobiles,” he said.
They also had to tie it down with six anchored ropes, because of its size and the pond’s notorious winds that would blow it to shore.
The only things inside are some shelving and a bunk. “The floor and steering wheel and dash — everything — is out. So it’s just a shell with our stuff in it,” Riley said.
“I mean I’ve got a stove now and our chairs in it, but as far as the cab goes, it’s just a shell,” Riley said. “We cook up there and it’s got heat in there. We could cook the fish there.”
But they don’t. Desroches is allergic to fish and Riley doesn’t like fish.
“We catch and release,” Riley said. “We don’t usually keep anything. We just want to catch them, throw them back and catch them again. The only thing we keep out is the pickerel and the perch. We throw them up on the ice for bald eagles.”
When they do get fish worth keeping — bass and trout — they bring them home to his father-in-law or his grandkids, Jakob and Jared LaPointe of Mexico.
“They’ll eat them, like bass and stuff like that,” he said. “We don’t always keep what we catch. We throw a lot of it back so we can catch it again. We say, ‘We’re not wasting the fish so long as we throw it back.’
“Although some of them we can’t throw them back in, because they swallow the hook too much or something. We bring those home. My grandkids love the bass and eat them. We catch a lot of bass up there.”
So what possessed him to make an ice fishing shack out of a truck cab?
“It’s something different,” Riley said. “I thought about it for a while and I said, ‘You know, that would work,’ and I took it down to Irving (Dixfield lumber mill) and weighed it before we took it up.
“I wanted to know what its weight was before we put it up so we would know how much ice we had to have. It weighs 2,500 pounds. We put it out Jan. 1. There was 10 inches of ice when we first put it out, but 8 inches is all it really needed, weight-wise.”
The Freightliner fishing shack is the talk of the River Valley community. Waves of photographs of it have washed across social media pages since last month.
And then there were the phone calls that began on day one, Riley said.
Ellis Pond Variety store owner Dennis Daniel said a friend called him that day and asked him how thick the ice was. When he told the guy, the man replied that there was a tractor-trailer truck parked on it just off French Island and he couldn’t see its wheels and thought it was sinking.
Daniel thought the man was pulling his leg. He called a friend to take a quick look and said he was stunned when she called back and said there was a tractor-trailer truck cab parked on the ice.
“He got quite a few calls the first week it was out there,” Riley said.
Riley and Desroches, who works plowing snow, fish every weekend at Roxbury pond, except when it snows.
On Feb. 7, “we did great,” Riley said. “We caught 18 fish. We had a real good time. We go up at least once a weekend, if not twice. We go on Saturdays, but sometimes we’ll do Sunday, too. It depends on how things are with the work schedule.”
Riley is on call and works Monday through Friday. His wife said he doesn’t take time off to go boating in the summer or anything else except ice fishing.
“Ice fishing is a good time,” Riley said. “We have a good time.”
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