Shooting Fireworks Under A Frozen Lake Is A Thing

Further proof that people will do anything for entertainment in the midst of winter: Ice fishing—with explosives! Which, granted, is a hell of a lot less disgusting than live bait, but still, sounds like a recipe for questionable results. In a recent video out of Tranas, Sweden, ice fisherman Nils Bremer demonstrates how to set off a firework underneath the frozen top layer of an icy lake. As the video shows, Bremer, standing on a dock with friends, first pokes a hole in the ice. He then lights his firecracker, and shoves the lit bottle rocket through the hole and into the water. The firecracker zooms away before exploding and sending a surprisingly large plume of smoke and ice into the air. The scene ends with a soft rain of water, ice fragments, and—possibly?—fish entrails. (What?! Look, I'm not here to protect you from the harsh reality of nature. They're setting off tiny bombs in a lake, some fish might've been harmed in the making of this film.)

Needless to say, children should not try this at home. Neither should adults, probably. Bremer was fortunate that his firework took off, away from the dock where he was standing. The resulting explosion looks large enough that, had it been closer, it could have easily taken out the dock and the people standing on it. Luckily for Bremer, no one was harmed, and we now have a new fish-killing technique to use the next time we go ice fishing (as we all do at some point in the day). What the “firework method” of fishing lacks in finesse, it certainly makes up for in general destructiveness.