By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

Lisa Martin laughed at the thought: No heavy metal allowed.

Martin is the executive director of the Maine Metal Products Association. The group is staging an ice fishing derby on Feb. 18 at Cobbosseecontee Lake, with the weigh-in at the Monmouth boat landing.

“We’re telling people there’s no metal allowed on the ice – just augers; cut the holes and get off,” she said only half-kidding Wednesday afternoon.

Ice, or the lack of it, has been giving some ice fishing tournament organizers nightmares. The last thing they want is for someone to attend a tourney and fall through.

With seasonably cold temperatures forecast for today and perhaps the next few days, Martin and Tom Noonan are among tourney directors crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

Noonan heads up the Sebago Lake Rotary Club’s ice fishing tournament, arguably the largest in Maine. The Sebago derby is a week after Martin’s Cobbosseecontee affair.

“Jordan Bay’s closed in,” he said Wednesday, “but the main bay isn’t.”

The Rotary’s derby is set for Feb. 25 and 26. Traditionally it’s limited to Sebago Lake. This year the club has made plans to open the derby to all of Maine’s legal iced-over fishing waters.

Right now, Noonan says, the plan is to keep the derby at Sebago. If conditions deteriorate, it’ll go statewide with weighing stations set up in Augusta, Bangor and Presque Isle as well as at the Raymond Beach.

Statewide or not, Noonan says most of the derby’s related events – car racing on the ice, a fly-in, snowmobile radar runs, a fundraising polar dip and other activities – will still be held at Sebago.

“We might have to cancel the cross-country skiing if we don’t get some snow,” but otherwise things are a go, he said.

The Rotary derby draws upward of 6,000 people annually, although not all of them enter.