Blenheim, Ontario ? Hmmm. This may not have been such a good idea.

Three or four times a year I meet a Canadian friend, Art Strasburg, to fish on Lake Erie or one of its tributary rivers. One trip is usually an ice-fishing excursion like this recent one on Rondeau Bay, about 60 miles east of Detroit .

We got to the area the night before a storm, but we awoke to near-blizzard conditions before dawn. I don’t know what the mice were doing, but the best-laid plans of a couple of men were rapidly ganging agley.

Showing more bravado than sense, we took a GPS mark on the parking area and began edging out onto the ice, where a 20-knot wind was creating a whiteout that limited visibility to about 30 feet.

The wind kept blowing over the shelters as we tried to set them up, and kicked them around after we got inside. After an hour, we admitted that fishing the open lake wasn’t such a good idea. But Strasburg had access to a spot behind a home on a sheltered shoreline not far away, and we decided to initiate Plan B and set up the portables there.

It was still windy and white, but the shanties at least stayed put once we got our weight inside them.

I’ve been using a Coleman Power Cat propane heater to warm my portable for a couple of years, and this was the most severe test yet. Despite the wind and temperatures below 10 degrees, it soon had the little tent toasty.

Figuring there might be pike in the area, I tied on a new Rapala jigging shad, which offers a bigger profile than the original jigging Rapala. The lure — silvery with touches of red — was in one hole, with the rod lying in my lap, while I jigged a wiggler on a tiny red, Russian-made teardrop in the other hole in an effort to interest some perch I could see milling around nearby.

In the first half-hour, I caught four undersized perch and Strasburg, who was also using wigglers on a 1/64th-ounce green jig, caught three. A couple of times I saw bigger fish swim past in the shadowy depths (the water was about eight feet deep) but couldn’t see what they were.

After catching the first perch, I’d stopped jigging with the Rapala and laid that rod across my lap, where it dangled in the water with almost no motion. As I shifted position after releasing the last perch, I inadvertently jigged the rod with the Rapala, and a second later it nearly came off my lap when something grabbed the lure.

Because the reel was loaded with four-pound line, it took a couple of minutes to play the fish back to the hole, where I was surprised to see that it was a 17-inch walleye.

The next two hours produced six more small but legal walleyes on the Rapala. The key seemed to be hopping it up and down a foot or so pretty vigorously for a couple of minutes, letting it sit for a minute, then jigging it hard again.

Five of the seven fish came seconds after that one-minute rest, and two hit after it had been jigged steadily for a while.

Normally, we’d use minnows on the jigging lure for walleyes, but the bait shop we had counted on didn’t open that morning. We sweetened the lures with wigglers that we’d bought the day before, and they seemed to do the trick.