The driver of a pickup truck took a wrong turn on the ice near Lockport on Saturday and crashed right through into the Red River.
"A blue truck had come down and, instead of staying to the left-hand side of the river and taking the turn, he decided to go straight, and plop in the water he went,” said Randy Mcpetrie, who took pictures of the aftermath. “Found a weak spot."
Witnesses said an oversize tow truck had to be called in to pull the partially submerged truck from the water, but the owner was able to drive away.
Mcpetrie says he and his friends don’t take any chances.
“No, we park on top of the hill and we walk down. My wife would kill me if I drove down here,” he said.
A conservation officer in the area on Sunday urged people to use extreme caution, saying just because the ice is thick enough to drive on in one spot, it might not be just a few metres away.
Rod House was out fishing on Sunday and he says he usually talks to friends who have been out before him about the thickness of the ice.
"A lot of the times I'll take my gas auger which I've got in the back of my truck,” said House. “I'll walk down myself and cut some holes to see how much ice is there before I bring my truck down."
A few kilometres downstream at Breezy Point, the ice is nearly a metre thick, but people with fishing shacks there don’t have much time before they have to take them off the ice or move them closer to Selkirk.
"We just moved it out here today,” said Dan Laing, pointing at his semi-permanent structure. “Probably didn't get out here until about 10 o'clock this morning, and I just found out that we have to have them off Feb. 2."
That’s because crews from North Red Waterway Maintenance will begin chopping up the ice at Breezy Point in early February to prevent ice jams from forming in the spring.
They will take four weeks to travel the 30 kilometres to the locks, leaving all fishers on the Red River counting the days until the end of the season.
