SWANVILLE – While some folks were welcoming the new year in the warmth of their homes, the ice fishermen of Swan Lake were out on the frozen surface at first light.

“When I got here it was still dark,” camp owner Sam Mehorter said Tuesday. “Then as it got light, it sounded like wolves howling in the distance when all the ice augers started up.”

From Mehorter’s camp, ice-fishing shacks and fishermen were spread out all along the lake’s east shore far into the distance. It wasn’t that way last year, Mehorter recalled, as the lake had yet to freeze and fishermen headed off for the nearby Goose River just to be able to say they wet a line on opening day.

This year the ice was about 8 inches thick and covered with snow. The weight of the snow from the New Year’s Eve storm pushed water up from cracks in the ice, turning the covering into a slushy mix of snow and water.

The slush and snow may have made it difficult for walking, but it could not dampen the spirits of the group that gathers each year at the camp to celebrate opening day. The men and their sons arrive early in the morning and stay late into the afternoon. They fish hard, swap stories and enjoy a few laughs. It’s a tradition that Mehorter and his pals have been enjoying for years.

“This is my New Year’s celebration,” Mehorter said. “I’ve got two dozen smelt and we’re having a blast.”

The most welcome guest this year was Montville resident Wendell Stairs, who arrived with a bag of elk steaks. The boyfriend of one of Stairs’ daughters and his father each got an elk and mule deer during a hunt last month in Colorado and shared some of their bounty with Stairs.

“Actually, I got it last week down behind my house,” Stairs quipped when one of the guys questioned how he managed to shoot an elk in Maine.

A cast-iron frying pan was deployed and soon the camp was filled with the odor of fried onions and elk meat. No plates were required as the men ate the elk from the pan, marveling at the new flavor and declaring it some of the best game they’d had in years.

Out on the ice Stairs and Mark Hansen were claiming bragging rights for the first catches of the season. When Hansen landed a 16-inch-long brook trout with a bright red belly, the fishermen speculated that it may have been one of the stock of brood fish that the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife released in the lake last year. In quick succession Stairs hauled a lake trout and landlocked salmon through the ice.

“There must be a school of smelt in this cove,” Stairs said. “This is the first salmon I’ve caught through the ice in 20 years.”

Of course, the talk wasn’t all about fishing. Every now and then the group would head back to the camp and sit around the fire. As Mehorter replenished the fireplace with logs and hung the wet socks and boots of 6-year-old Jack Hansen to dry, the talk turned to gardening and the weather.

Mehorter’s father-in-law, Phil Crosby of Belfast, grumbled about the storm the day before and how visibility was so bad that morning that he managed to drive into a snowbank at the Waldo County YMCA without seeing it and had to get towed out.

Jim Black of Belfast spoke about the bumper crop of grape tomatoes he raised in his new greenhouse last summer. Stairs, who also brought along a jar of homemade dilly beans, recalled how he looked all over for dill seed last spring only to find a patch of it growing wild at the edge of his garden. “I had already mowed over it three times,” he said.

The fishing slowed after that morning spurt and by early afternoon the tip-ups had been undisturbed for hours. That didn’t matter, though, as the friends were just as happy sitting around talking as hauling fish. It was a new year and a new season, and most of them would be back in the same spot next week, once more trying their luck.

“This is what it’s all about,” said Mehorter. “What can be better than being out on the lake fishing?”