Polar Fox Outdoors is quickly becoming one of the top names in wheelhouse and skid house fishing.  Chris Larsen, host of the Fish House Nation Podcast, spoke with Chris Beberg from Polar Fox Outdoors at the St. Paul Ice Show.  They discussed their new X series fish houses. These houses are designed specifically with forward-facing sonar in mind.  

Chris Larsen: Tell me a little bit about what's going on with Polar Fox this year. 

Chris Beberg: At Polar Fox, we're really making a big push on the skid houses this year. We've got our new Model X here, which we do in a couple of lengths, but it's great for the forward-facing sonar, so we can line up a bunch of people, have a linear row of holes, share that all up with one sonar, or one transducer up onto the TVs. It’s a popular layout that was great in the trailers, and we're doing it in the skid houses, so fun to show that. 

Chris Larsen: You got into it a little bit there, but what are the advantages?

Chris Beberg:  The advantage is how much fun it becomes to share the fishing experience. And what we do is with one transducer down, for the person that's having to set up the house, set up everything, bring the gear for your family or friends, if you're that person, it's really nice to deal with one transducer. And in this case, it sits right in the middle on most of your forward-facing systems. That makes my job easy. I don't have a lot to bring out, but I also don't have a lot of sonars in the house where people trip over them and so forth. But really the magic of forward-facing sonar, to me, is how interactive it makes for everybody out there. So we're now able to see everybody's fishing activity. So it's kind of fun to noodle people when you're missing one or hey, the fish is coming to you or you stole my fish. 

What it does is keep everybody engaged because now we're seeing that fish move through the area. We know there are fish there, we can tell their size, and we can often tell species that are down there. And so now we're sharing, we're conversing, we're discussing it, and that's the blast of forward facing for me. Definitely, some people get worried you catch a lot more fish. It's not been my problem. I really just have a lot of fun using it. So this house is set up specifically for that. You've got a couple of televisions here. Everything's kinda networked together. 

Chris Larsen: When people come in and take a look at this, what are they saying? 

Chris Beberg: They sit down for quite a while and they just imagine themselves in it. And what we see a lot is again, when they think of bringing their grandkids, their kids, their friends into it, and they start to want to share that experience, that's where this house becomes so fun. And it just, they're picturing all those people having fun together out on the ice. And that's why I call it very family-friendly, is I think we do well to make it a bigger experience than just catching fish. We have a lot of fun together in these. So that's what I hear them talking about. 

We're seeing a lot of skid houses at the show this year. Is that kind of a new trend, something that you're seeing? You know, I look back, 14 years ago I came here with the very first manufactured ice fishing skid house and we were put in the hallway upstairs and I was kind of thinking back to that. And the questions then were, how does this work? How do you trailer it? It was kind of the initial. So along those years, skid houses have come a long way.  

I've probably dealt with almost a thousand people on skids over the years. You start to really see when are people successful in loving a skid house as their house for many years, and when is it not the right fit, and wheelhouses are a better fit. So yeah, there's definitely an increase in the number of skid houses out there. It's an awesome opportunity for the right person, I think, with the right type of expectations on what their trailer might be, where they use it, what they tow it with, and I think that's the fun conversation to have when you're here. 

Chris Larsen: Tell me a little bit about that. Who is a wheelhouse for? 

Chris Beberg: A wheelhouse still has a big advantage if you're using, say, four wheelers, I like them. If you're a person that has wheels on a four-wheeler and you're going to have limitations for the type of conditions you go through based on that towing machine, all of a sudden a lightweight trailer is a very effective system. I kind of argue, say central Minnesota and south. Dakotas where you get a lot of wind blowing, the lakes clearer and hardening off quickly, versus Wisconsin where you have deep lakes holding a lot of snow. In these areas with less snow like the Dakotas, it's great to have wheels. You don't have that friction of the skis, you can get on and off those little lakes easily. 

So there are places where I like a lightweight wheelhouse. And I think when people are making these decisions, it's really important, to consider an RV type of wheelhouse, fantastic comfort in all the space, and so forth. But that's the whole category in a weight system that's different than there is a slice of wheelhouses that are light and that you can really think about, is that fit your priorities the best most of the time versus an RV or versus a skid house? I love our trailers, but I absolutely am a skid house guy because I know that there's 10 to 15% of the time I can't do with a trailer what I'm gonna go do with this skid house. I like the layouts, I love them, but I know that I'm safe and I can go more places and that's kind of worth the extra work for me on the skid house. 

Chris Larsen: What's the customer profile for a skid house? Who is this ideal for? 

Chris Beberg:  The first thing we always hear from people is, boy, I love this, if I lived on a lake, that would be my choice for a fish house. So yeah, that is a nice use where I just pull it back to the shoreline, I pull it out and fish. These are so lightweight and easy to move that I actually pull mine in almost every day. Go search for fresh ice the next day. Certainly can leave them out there. That person is an obvious user, but what we're trying to bridge the gap and expand it is, that I'm a person that travels around to different lakes. I bring a side-by-side with tracks with me.  So now how do I get a fish house that matches what my towing machine can do? And that's where the skid kind of comes in. If I'm running a Ranger, Defender, name your brand, crew cab, standard cab with the tracks on it, that machine weighs a lot. getting it in a trailer makes a very big heavy trailer. So I dislike that myself. 

I want a lightweight fish house that floats, that says, hey, I've got this $30,000 or $40,000 machine designed to go through deep snow and slush. I want a fish house that comes with me. That's where the skid really opens it up and says, yeah, you can go anywhere you want. If that machine gets there, the skid also come with you. Then we just package it on the right trailer and try to make that simple and easy for how you would otherwise tow a trailer in your life. work through those things. But skids are, to me it's all about are you going to use the advantage of the flotation and the go anywhere type of approach or do you live on the lake? It becomes kind of an obvious there. 

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Chris Larsen: Tell me a little bit about Polar Fox. What are the advantages to going with the Polar Fox skid house? 

Chris Beberg: At Polar Fox, what we really key on is making our panels that we use for our walls, our ceiling and our floor. It's a composite panel. So we have fiberglass on both sides of this, inside and out. It's a high density foam board in the middle. So it's rot proof, very lightweight, extremely strong, perfectly insulated 100% everywhere. And that's kind of where our magic starts is the structure of what we build. It's the kind of thing you'll have for forever. Then we trim it out with our PVC inside. So you've got rot proof again, very strong, durable materials that we use on that. I think it looks awesome.

When it comes to layouts, you know, we listen to the users, we are users ourselves.  We really work hard to make things that are effective for how you walk in and out of the house. How do you fish it? How do you use your sonars? We think about those and try to help people make sure that they just jump in, have fun fishing. It's all been thought about and figured out for them ahead of time. 

Chris Larsen: If people want to find out more about Polar Fox. What's the best way for them to do it? 

Chris Beberg: PolarFoxOutdoors.com is the website and then we got a good amount of stuff on Facebook as well.