81-Year-Old Man Saves Himself After Falling Through Ice on Lake Fenton

After ice fishing on Lake Fenton for more than 50 years, Don Bugala is calling it quits.

The 81-year-old Fenton resident “looked death in the eye” after falling through the ice Tuesday with no one around to help and has vowed to fish only in the summer for the rest of his life.

“I escaped the grim reaper, and I figure I don’t want to do that anymore,” he said.

Bugala walked in his backyard around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday to do some crappie fishing on Lake Fenton, the same way he had done hundreds of times since moving into the home in the 1950s. He walked on the ice along the shoreline to test it. He said it looked solid for the most part, so he traveled out farther on the snow-covered ice, a couple hundred yards to a place he fished regularly.

He saw ice that looked kind of gray with no snow out past that point where the water was about 20 feet deep.

“It didn’t look too good there. I was concerned,” Bugala said. “I said ‘I can’t cross that.’ I turned around to come back.”

With that first step back towards shore, he suddenly broke through the ice and found his whole body emerged in freezing cold water.

“I didn’t panic, but boy I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he said. “There was no one around. I could have yelled my head off and no one would have heard me.”

The only thing not in the water was one of Bugala’s feet, which was equipped with an ice creeper, a shoe attachment that helps the foot grip to the ice. He dug in the spike on his shoe into ice and put his elbows on the solid surface. With one mighty heave, he ended up on his back at the edge of the hole. The 81-year-old said he had never been happier that he’d kept up with lifting weights to strengthen his muscles.

“It took every bit of strength I had,” he said. “I don’t think most 81-year-olds would have had the strength to lift themselves up.”

However, he knew he couldn’t stand up or he’d break through the ice again and be back in the water, so he rolled about 20 feet to stronger ice and stood up and walked back to his house.

“It was almost a miracle I did make it,” said Bugala, who has also beat cancer and survived falling off a boat in the Bahamas during his lifetime. "You realize life is great."

He went inside his home and took a hot shower and put on a change of clothes. He was still shaking and realized how close he came to death. After he warmed up a bit, he told his wife “she was almost a widow.”

“It was a pretty big shock.” Bugala’s wife, Muriel said.

And although fishing has been his passion all of his life, Bugala said his ice fishing career is definitely over.

“I made a solemn declaration that even if the ice is 18 inches thick, I’m not going out there," he said.