AUBURN – Patrick Luizzo shivered as he slid links of plastic pipe beneath the frozen surface of Lake Auburn early Tuesday. His Starbucks coffee cooled on the ground. And it began to rain.

Yet, Luizzo – a native of Jamaica – smiled.

“I’m addicted,” he said. “I’m a fish junkie.”

He was one of the few anglers to step into the cold Tuesday morning for the start of Maine’s open-water fishing season.

Around Lake Auburn, usually a hub of activity for the kickoff, several die-hards got out early. Their aim: capitalize on the few spots where the water ran unencumbered by ice.

“I’ve fished Lake Auburn since I was a kid,” Warden Dave Chabot said, standing beside a narrow strip of land between the lake and Lake Shore Drive. “I’ve never seen so few people out here.”

He guessed that the entire season on the lake will be two or three weeks late, due to the inaccessibility of open water.

At 5 a.m., workers from the Lewiston and Auburn water districts began counting the cars parked around the lake. There were 13 people on the first pass and only three more when they drove by almost two hours later.

“Normally, there are 70 or 80 cars,” said Dan Fortin of the Auburn Water District.

Most of those who did park their cars and unpack their tackle and bait buckets had solutions to the frozen surface. There were several variations on the plastic pipes, used to push the end of the fishing line under the ice and out from the shoreline. In each case, they used a rubber band to hold the line in place until they chose to dislodge it with a yank.

“I invented it,” said Lawrence Rideout, a Lewiston native who has fished the same spot on opening day for 15 straight years.

He staked out his regular spot – overlooking an ice-fighting culvert – at 10 a.m. on Monday. He set up a small tent on the roadside with his 18-year-old son, Anthony, and dropped his line into the water at midnight, the moment fishing season began.

Ten hours later, he had yet to hook a keeper.

He hoped for a salmon or a bass, but he’d be all right if he caught nothing. The appeal of fishing is being outside in nature, even if the weather is surly, he said.

“Fishing is a line with a jerk on one end waiting for a jerk on the other,” he joked.

Luizzo grinned as he reached into his bucket, pulled out a wriggling smelt and impaled the bait fish on a hook.

Since 1999, Luizzo, who lives in Auburn, has been fishing here on opening day. In some years, there was plenty of open water.

It really didn’t matter, though. Just being here on April 1 was all he really needed.

“What more can you ask?” he said. “As long as I can see water on opening day, I’ll be here.